Auto Extras: Investigating three value dash cams

Roads in Australia mightn’t foster such viral YouTube videos, but owning a dash cam can still be a good idea. For most of us, their primary use would be recording crash footage for either insurance or police purposes. In some countries, you can get a discount on your insurance by sporting an insurer-approved cam.

But their applications don’t stop at accidents. Dash cams can be used to illustrate traffic issues in your neighbourhood before they become a potentially deadly problem. You can trail a learning driver and show them the bad habits that might cause them problems down the, well, road. You may even want to document a picturesque drive – no fender benders required.

We purchased three readily available dash cams and put them through their paces to get a feel for the market. The biggest thing we looked for was image quality, which may seem obvious, but a cam’s ability to capture a crisp, detailed image can be the difference between picking up the licence plate of a car at speed and it being an indistinct blur. Most dash cams these days feature 1080p recording, and we’d find it hard to recommend any that don’t. In fact, some of the more expensive units can record in 4K – a 300% increase in resolution from a typical Blu-ray disc.

Before we talk about their differences, let’s cover what the dash cams we looked at have in common. All of them record MP4 files onto micro SD cards, but the Garmin camera was the only one to come with a micro SD installed. All three units have GPS functionality that can watermark video with your location at the time of any incident, even though none of them give you any real ability to export or manipulate the GPS data.

All three dash cams record video continuously while they’re operating. As with most CCTV systems, once their storage is used up they discard the oldest footage to make way for the new. However, in the case of an accident, each of our units is also equipped with motion sensors that automatically save relevant video if an incident is detected.

All charge via a cigarette lighter and can also charge via USB, if you have a port hanging ’round.

The Garmin dash cam records in 1080p and has the widest field of view of the units we tested. It touts wi-fi functionality, but that functionality is limited to connecting an app to an ad-hoc wi-fi network created by the camera at the time of downloading the footage. The trouble that takes would be, in most cases, far more than simply popping out the SD card and saving the video files directly to a computer. Though if you live your whole life on your phone, it might be useful.

It feels solid and well-built. It was the smallest of the cameras we tried, which leads to a small trade-off in screen size but also means it’s unobtrusive and easy to mount. It attaches via a small, sticky pad that detaches from the camera itself via magnet – a system that’s low-profile and well designed but comes at the expense of having a small metal disc on your windshield. This may or may not be a deal breaker for you.

The Garmin has a bunch of extra features. One to detect red lights and speed cameras that, sadly, isn’t supported in Australia. An automatic parking mode that will capture video of an incident if you’re stationary and out of the car. Two collision-alert features: it can give an assertive beep when you’re driving too close to the car in front of you or straying from your lane. However, we’re hesitant to recommend using the Garmin as a driving aid without more rigorous testing.

Of all the units we tested, the Garmin is the most geared towards non-insurance uses: its ‘travelapse’ mode allows you to shoot time-lapse video of a scenic road trip, should you desire.

It also features a voice-control system à la Siri or Alexa (“Hey, Garmin…”) that can save video, take pictures, start or stop audio recording, and start or stop the time-lapse feature. If you’ve used Siri before, you know how spotty its voice recognition can be. So you might need to manage your expectations of voice control from a $200 dash cam.

The Garmin is the best we tried for features and looks, but it suffers a little in the video-quality stakes.

This is a larger unit than the similarly specced Garmin, but what you lose in low profile you gain in screen size. It shares 1080p recording, parking mode and day/night recording with the Garmin; it loses the collision alert, voice control and time-lapse mode while gaining a ‘driver fatigue alert’ that notifies you when you’ve been driving continuously for two hours.

Attachment is via a solid-feeling suction cup. We had no issues with it staying put. It’s a good option if you dislike the idea of a semi-permanent attachment like the Garmin’s.

Video quality was sharper and higher-contrast than the Garmin’s, with less obvious compression artefacts. Licence plates were easier to read and the video, overall, seemed smoother – even though both cameras record at 30 frames per second.

If you want to provide maximum recording coverage, the Navman is for you. Plus, it supports an optional rear camera that also records at 1080p. If you live in fear of the rear-ender, it could be a good option.

The Kogan’s build quality felt light and flimsy and the GPS was, bewilderingly, separated from the main body of the unit – adding another cable to potentially obstruct your view. The suction-cup mount popped off a couple of times, and the menu system was sluggish and confusing.

We haven’t included sample video, as the recorded files seem to be locked inside some rinky-dink third-party software that doesn’t run on Apple devices. Not such a loss. The Kogan only records in 480p and, looking at the device’s display, we didn’t seem to be missing much.

The only interesting feature of the Kogan is that it has two cameras – one facing the road and one facing the driver. You can record from either or both simultaneously. The last configuration will render you a split-screen video file, which may have some utility for taxi or ride-sharing drivers or an episode of the world’s worst carpool karaoke. Otherwise, this is one to avoid.

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