No matter whether you’re a business owner that owns a fleet of vehicles or a worried parent who is worried about your teen drivers, a reliable dash cam is a must-have nowadays to save you from endless worrying. It can be very handy in terms of fleet management, it can provide vital information in the case of a car accident, and it can free you from false accusations and even insurance scams as dash cam footage is admissible in the court.
Despite the importance of having a dash cam in your car, seldom cars have it installed by default. For most car owners, if you would like to have a dash cam, you will have to choose and install it yourself. Thus, here comes the questions. How to choose the right dash cam? Which one is more worth buying? There are a few key factors that need to be considered while choosing dash cams.
- High Resolution
One of the key factors that should be considered is footage resolution. Most dash cams on the market now feature 1080p FHD resolution, some features 720p, and a few premium brands offer 4K dash cams. 720p is good to record what happens on the road, but sometimes it is not sufficient to provide detailed information, such as license plates. 1080p is the standard for dash cams. The resolution is good enough to catch any necessary details and it won’t take too much storage of the memory card. 4k dash cams are becoming popular now as the prevalence of 4K TVs. But the downside of it would be taking too much space on your memory card and if you would like to record an eight-hour road trip, you will need to have a really large memory card. So please choose wisely based on your needs.
- Loop Recording and Accident Detection
Loop recording makes sure that your dash cam won’t suddenly stop recording because the storage is full. The schema behind loop recording is that it will constantly record and erase the oldest file if the storage reaches its limit. Therefore, it is necessary for you to turn on this feature manually in the settings. Because in most dash cams this feature is turned off by default. The second cool feature that is trendy now is accident detection. This feature utilizes the G-sensor (gravity sensor) that is built-in to dash cam to detect a sudden change in direction. Once an external force is detected, the g-sensor will trigger the dash cam to lock the footage and save it into a separate file and make it ease when looking for the footage.
- Night vision
The probability of a car accident at night is much higher than during the daytime, which makes it crucial for you to purchase a dash cam that is equipped with excellent night vision capabilities. Some dash cams offer WDR technology which can handle bright and dark conditions and adjust the change of lighting condition very quickly. Others simply offer large apertures which are also good enough to capture clear images in low-light conditions. How to judge whether the night recording of a dash cam meets your needs? One easy way is to check out product reviews and look for dash cam footage of a certain model on the internet.
