Another common question that I've seen come up with increasing frequency is about "Car Cams" or "Black Boxes."  

Everyone has seen those "America's Wildest Police Chases!!" videos from various agencies, where some horrific crash/shooting/chase is recorded on a vehicle mounted camera.  These LE-geared models record to a trunk-mounted video recorder, and sometimes include telemetry from the vehicle: speed, direction, unit #, etc.  The videos make for great TV, but the video units themselves are quite expensive.  They're part of multi-thousand-dollar systems... some of them include wireless links that enable the vehicle to automatically dump the recorded video to a secure server when the vehicle pulls into the station or sally-port.  

They require a lot of wiring, lock-boxes, expensive cameras, remote mics, WIFI bridges, and so forth.  This is MUCH more than the average Joe wants to do to his vehicle.

Fortunately, alternatives exist... some of them quite reasonably-priced.

Enter the "black box."  Quite popular in other parts of the world, they've been slower to catch on in the United States.  These are integrated flash-based camera units that mount on the inside of your vehicle's windshield.  They're not technically a CCTV product, as much as they're a stand-alone video camera.  Some are merely that; a camera.  Others actually include GPS tracking data, and when paired with their viewing software, can provide a full Google-maps-based route of where you were, what street you were on, how fast you were going, three-axis G-sensor readings, and HD video of the trip.  

Not bad for $2-300 each.  

I've been using the following camera in my vehicle for about a year:




It's a SmartyHD BX1500, with a 170-degree wide-angle lens.  It records to a standard SD card, includes GPS readings, and integrates with Google maps through the software.  In a year, I've only had one occasion where if flaked out.  After contacting their tech support, and re-initializing the flash card, the problem was fixed.   The interface looks like this:



I'll call your attention to a couple of things (don't mind the pixelated areas... those are for PERSEC).  See the squirrel (circled in red) in the road?  Now note the circled area in the G-force graph below the video window... see the dip in the red line?  That shows where I slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting the little tree rat (my kids were in the car).  The interface is intuitive, and it allows you to export video, and stills.  The configuration screen looks like this:



You can adjust frame-rate, video quality, resolution, mode, and so forth.  

The video quality is quite good during the day.  You can see where you're going, read signs on the edge of the road, and see any events that happen in front of you.  The video is not, however, good enough to read license plates... a major strike against the system.  

The night video quality isn't the greatest.  In fact, unless you're driving through a well-lit area, you don't see much.  Here is a GIF I made of my nearly hitting a young deer on a country road.  The only lights out there are my headlights.




(To be continued)

The video taken by the Smarty is 1280x960, which is quite a bit more detailed than standard analog video.  I wondered how it would compare, scene-for-scene, so I mounted a small Pyle analog camera down on the bumper of my truck, with the signal going back to an Axis video encoder.  The Axis records to a micro-SD card, and I took the video directly off the card for comparison.

The video was shot simultaneously by the Smarty, and the analog Pyle camera, and synced-up with Sony Vegas.  

The hardware:



Vs:








Notice a couple of things; the reflection off the inside of the windshield partially degrades the video of the Smarty camera... and the only camera that can resolve the license plate of that vehicle in front is the analog camera (I suspect that is mostly because it's six feet closer to the vehicle compared to the Smarty).  

License plates are a particular challenge for the wide-angle 170-degree Smarty camera, since it seems to lack the pixel density.  Smarty makes a 120-degree model, which we will try to test in another installment.

(To be continued)

Now we're going to compare three different cameras:  an analog Pyle Camera, a SmartyHD with a 120-degree lens, and a FineVu CR300-HD.  

The cameras were all mounted on the same vehicle, and the videos were shot at the same time, on the same scene.  We already tried a 170-degree Smarty, so now we're going to try the 120-degree.  Here are the contenders:

FineVu camera with a polarized filter:



SmartyHD BX1500 120-degree model:



Analog Pyle camera:





We looked at the analog camera previously, so let's examine the two new cameras, side-by-side.   The FineVu is considerably smaller than the Smarty:



The Smarty takes an SD-card, while the FineVu takes a MicroSD card:



The mounts both attach to the windshield with 3M red/clear mounting tape:



They both have video-out ports (Note to Subnet), and the FineVu can actually be directly mounted as an external drive through the USB port.  The Smarty requires that you remove the SD card to extract any recorded video.



The business end:





Here is a short clip of day video on a straight road.  The first portion is the analog camera, the second portion the Smarty, and the third portion the FineVu.  The analog camera is much more of a down-on-the-road view, since it's mounted to the bumper (and it gives you a fine close-up of a squished squirrel towards the end of its portion), while the other two are mounted high on the inside of the windshield.  





Here is a night-view of a U-turn.  The sections are in the same order:  Analog, Smarty, then FineVu.  



Note that all of the cameras give good coverage during the day, but all three degrade significantly at night.  The Smarty is particularly dark, while the Pyle/analog and the FineVu provide much more detail beyond the reach of the vehicle's headlights.  The Smarty has the best video quality at night, but the least light sensitivity, so what you can see is pretty clear, but beyond that it's all black.

Note:  if purchasing the FineVu camera, get the polarized filter.  It significantly improves the video quality during the day, and takes out a LOT of the glare and reflection from the inside of the windshield.  It doesn't show as much in this video, but on other segments I've shot it's VERY noticeable.  The filter is highly recommended.

Excellent videos, Ry... I see what you mean about the crappy mount.  

I also like your idea about reading off the license plates... but unfortunately, I turn the audio offf.  I tend to sing/swear/rant/cuss to myself while I'm driving home from work (it's my decompression... gotta get it out of my system before I get home.  Can't have the kids hearing their old man cursing a blue streak).  Maybe I should work on that...

And in that fourth video, I had a Beaky the Buzzard moment listening to you go "nope nope nope" as you were sliding on the ice  

 It's cool... no sweat.

BTW, which model camera is that you're using?

I'm probably going to make the FineVu my full-time front camera, and move the Smarty to the rear glass.

I'd recommend it; it's cheap insurance.

Are you hoping to sell it on here or something?

If you have some video from yours, post it up!

ETA:   never mind... bought one myself.  I'll have some comparison shots up as soon as I've had a chance to play with it.

A new contender has entered the ring against the FineVu and the SmartyHD...






This is the BlackVue DR500GW-HD... a cylindrical camera of a similar style to the SmartyHD.  It has a 2MP sensor, and records to a MicroSD card.  This one also has an interesting feature: Wifi.  You can reportedly connect to it via wifi to get video off the camera without unmounting it, or removing the memory card.  






It's larger than I thought it would be... about 4.5" long.  It's lightweight (didn't get a weight on it yet), and feels to be made of mostly plastic.  The grey mounting ring concerns me a bit... that may make it stand out on the inside of the windshield, and be more visible to thieves.  






Measured against the length of my hand.  This isn't a small camera... and here it is alongside the SmartyHD, which is considerably smaller, and lower-profile:









Comes with the usual goodies, including mounting tape (appears to be the red 3M tape), brackets to help guide the cable around the inside of the windshield, and a handy-dandy little USB MicroSD card reader... a nice bonus.






I plan to do some side-by-side testing against the FineVu, so stay tuned.  Should have something to report next week.  

So here's some preliminary stuff on the FineVu Vs the BlackVue.  

(My vehicle has become quite the test-bed... here's what the passenger-side of my windshield looks like )






Here's a quick view of the interfaces from the respective cameras (I actually like the software on the SmartyHD the best of the three).  The Blackvue has this nifty time-line feature on the bottom of the screen, allowing you to jump ahead by minutes, hours, seconds, etc.  The file list can be tabbed to give you a google-map location.









Here is a poor video comparison of the FineVue (first 17 seconds), and the BlackVue (second 17 seconds).  I apologize for the quality... this was compressed from native format to MPEG4, to WMV11... so this doesn't begin to do justice to the original quality.  I had to do that because the native formats are literally hundreds of megabytes.  You will notice one thing when you compare the two halves of the video... the second half has MUCH more reflection from the inside of the windshield (and I think the video quality isn't quite as good anyway).  This again shows the benefit of the polarized filter.

Can't stress enough what a benefit that little filter gives... you're cheating yourself if you don't get one.

I was doing that so you wouldn't have to.

I'm going to attempt to re-encode that video I posted... that conversion really came out looking like sh*t.

ETA:  the FineVue gives you an AVI container file, but with a H.264 codec... trying to find a plug-in for Vegas

I have to enter a strike against the FineVue.  They may have the best picture quality of these three cameras (my opinion so far), and the smallest, lowest-profile camera, but their video is a PITA to work with.

Everything other manufacturer has an export tool in their viewer... or records to an easily parsable format... but not the FineVue.  In fact, I tried several non-freeware/commercial tools to manipulate the full-quality video, but was forced to re-encode it to WMV, MPEG-2/4, or MOV in order for it to be cropped/edited in any of the non-linear editors I use.


Here's what  G-spot had to say about the file:







Adobe Premier Elements didn't like it.







Vegas didn't recognize the video portion either.







I'm not a pro-level video geek, but I know my way around a video editor, and I understand formats, encoding, etc.  If I'm having trouble with this, I imagine some other people may as well.

Any of you aforementioned video geeks can feel free to put me some frickin' knowledge in here.  

Let me see if I can get something innocuous uploaded, and I'll PM you a link.

BTW, on the blackvue?  You'll want to be disabling those LEDs.  There are a bunch of them... and at night, they can be seen blinking away on your windshield from 50 feet away.

The good news is that they CAN be disabled... but they're on by default... and that bright blinking one in the front, which they term a "Security LED?"  Obnoxious.

The wifi light is also on by default... a nice bright blue.  You can see it and the blinking Security LED in the second half of this video:






I played a bit with the wifi function today.  It does connect, just like an access point.  The default passphrase is "blackvue."  The software for Android is reasonably good... except you can't actually view recorded videos on your tablet (with ANY software... even the blackvue software... no idea why).  You can watch live video from it as you drive... my son in the back seat got a kick out of that while I was driving.  

Huh... I tried AVIDemux before I posted my lament.. it didn't work.

Back to play with it some more.

Here is a minute-long video comparing the four cameras I currently have mounted.

Each section is labeled.

This is the same section of road, at roughly the same time-frame (the analog section is shortly before the three digital/HD sections... I didn't get them synced up exactly right, as denoted by that last orange barrel you see in the right side of the screen).  

The first analog section is just for comparison... the digital car-cams provide much better pictures.

For picture quality, I have to give it to the FineVue, especially with the polarized filter... but its video format (if worked on outside their viewer software... which doesn't export video) is the hardest to work with... it's literally painful.  The FineVue is also the smallest of the lot, but part of that is because it lacks an internal GPS receiver/chip, which the other digital cameras build into their units.  The FineVue GPS receiver is available as an external $50 option, and it requires additional wiring.    

The SmartHD has the best viewer software IMO... very user-friendly.  The video quality is decent, and it takes a standard-sized SD card.  You can also get extra mounting rings, in case you want to move it from vehicle to vehicle (the ring stays mounted to the windshield).  

The Blackvue has a bunch of nifty features, including a wireless client that keeps you from having to remove the memory card.... except you can't view recorded video through the wireless client... only live.    It also has a video-brightness problem that has been documented on some of their forums (and you can see at the end of this video).  Note how the video suddenly brightens up?  And the lighting conditions outside (bright sunlight) didn't change?  It's a known glitch, and I don't know if they have a fix out there for it yet.  It's also the largest of these cameras, and not very low-profile.  I could also do without the multitude of LEDs.

Yes.... same software.  So far, I haven't tried it under iOS... just Android (4.1.2).

Live video worked, but playback would not function.  I got as far as the file list (denoted in your picture), but none of the files would actually play back.  I did manage to change the camera settings with the wifi client.

ETA:  playback does work well under iOS.

I thought the Smarty had the best UI out of the three.  The finevue doesn't even offer an export function... you have to remember the filename, go into the device as an external drive, find that specific file, and copy/paste it.

What a PITA.

Tag.

Not bad for $50  

Please post your experience with some screenshots once you have it installed.