S9D HD 720P Smallest In Car Dash Camcorder Camera Video Register Recorder DV DVR

The SD9 HD carcam that arrived from Amazon (really "Mavis's Diary") was not quite what was pictured, but given information from this video review, it was OK:[...]They sent the one with Chinese symbols on it, not English. No biggie.It records 1280x720 at 24 frames/second in AVI format (mjpeg). I put a 16GB Class 10 card in it, which will hold about 2.5 hours of video from this camera.Good: It's small and discrete, solidly built, and hides behind the mirror well. Fully automatic on/off when wired as intended. Video files work fine with Quicktime on a Macintosh. No special software required. The picture quality is quite good. I haven't gotten the "thermonuclear sky effects" the version reviewed on Techmoen got, which surprised me as I'm in Colorado at 6,000 feet elevation where the sun is darned bright. I like that it defaults to no audio. I will buy another for a second car.Not as good: auto on/off is triggered by power to the white ACC lead. If all power is cut, meaning power to the red + lead, then the camera forgets what date & time you set and reverts to some time in 2011. If you add a lighter plug (not included) to power both ACC and + leads, you'll lose the date & time. A minor thing considering the price. Installation took me a couple of hours, as I was methodical about it and wanted the wires well-hidden by interior trim. The wires were plenty long enough for installation in my Honda Odyssey.The audio quality is pretty poor -- talk must be loud & clear to understand it on playback. I prefer no audio, so this is a non-issue for me.Of the vendor choices on Amazon, I chose Mavis's Dairy because it looked like an American company that perhaps stocked them and would ship from the US. That was an $8 mistake, as it shipped from Hong Kong anyway (it came in 15 days). Next time I'll buy from the lowest bidder.For comparison, I also have a $310 top-of-the-line Blackvue DR-500GW-HD, my first carcam. What does it do for the premium price? It talks to your smartphone via WiFi, so you can show a cop what happened in your crash then & there, instead of having to take the SD card to a computer to for display. If your car has a screen with an RCA-plug video input, an SD9 would provide that capability, too. The SD9 is really amazing for the price. The Blackvue is over twice the size of the SD9. It still mounts out of the driver's view behind the mirror, but it's more obvious from outside the car. It plugs into a lighter socket, so it doesn't need fancy installation if you don't want to bother.The Blackvue gives higher quality video and audio but has its downsides, too. It displays the date & time somewhere in Asia no matter what time zone you tell it it's in. Such things might someday be fixed with updated firmware.

If this camera were $20 more, it would be 3 stars.Installation wasn't too bad. The wire is thin enough to hide behind the headliner and various trim pieces. Video quality is mediocre at best. Street signs and license plates are hard to read and audio is mediocre also. You can easily make out car colors, makes and models. Horns come through on the audio loud and clear. Red and green lights are visible, however not very clearly.The auto-start record is great. Once the date and time are set, you can forget about this camera. It is also small enough that if positioned well, the driver cannot see it. The files are .AVI format and play on a Windows 7 computer with no problem. My Chromebook cannot play them (even though it is a supported file format). It also works with a class 10 memory card. If you have a DVD player or nav system with an aux video input jack, this is a good addition.The instructions are horrible. If you have a clue about automotive wiring, you can easily handle it. Setting the date and time is an exercise in random button mashing.Overall, for the price, it is a decent camera. I may buy another one for my second car.6/15/2014 update.I purchased another one for my second car from the same seller. The unit looked the same however there are two major functional differences;1. The red wire on my first camera was fused and connected to constant power (per the directions). My second unit had the yellow wire fused, however the directions told me to connect the red wire to constant power. This caused the camera to not save the date and time or the last video clip. It didn't take long to figure out I needed to swap the wires but the directions should have indicated this change.2. The first unit didn't have a menu. Holding the play/pause button and big red button brought me to a date/time setting screen. The second unit didn't work the same way. I had to press the big red button followed by the far right button. The menu has a lot of options not disclosed. There were three resolution setting (1080, 720 and a lower one), three impact sensitivity settings, several choices for how long to make each file, several choices for how long the camera stays on after accessory power is cut and several other options.The first camera I bought has frozen up once. Hours after the car was turned off, the two LED lights that indicate recording were still on. The camera was warm to the touch and wasn't responding to buttons. I unplugged it the plugged it back in. It appears to be working fine now.11/2/2014 Update. Both cameras are dead now. One starts normally but stops recording after a couple of minutes. The other got a break in the wire from getting unplugged while it was frozen.

The camera works, sometimes...For the most part it will record and turn on/off normally, but at random times it appears to just decide to stop recording for no apparent reason.Example of this is, while car is on and i'm driving for the past 12 mins it is recording, i'm still driving on the road but it will all of a sudden not record or not save the files anymore from that point on. Although the next time I turn my car back on, it starts recording normal again. Its quite random and you will never know when it will happen. When it does this, the red light indicating that the camera is on and recording is still flashing the whole time. The reason this is bad is, what happens if it cuts out while smth happens?I found out this was happening because something ALMOST happened on the road with a car merging lanes and almost hitting me, and I wanted to review the video that was recorded. So after I got back home, about 30 mins later I plug it in and all the footage from a bit before the incident and to when I got home, was missing! tats over 30 mins of footage just no recorded or saved for no apparent reason.At the moment i'm gonna keep the camera, but I will be researching and purchasing a new camera to hook up to my car.

The Car Dash Camcorder is a nice package - very small. It came in the minimum stated time. It has a large wiring bundle with three wires (red, black, and white) and a yellow RCA male plug. It did not come with a cigar lighter plus which is what I expected! There were no installation instructions in the package. I don't want to guess and possibly short out the unit. WHERE CAN I GO FOR INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS?