Those piggy back holders are good, I used one to fit a UHF 80ch CB radio in my car and they made powering the thing up a snip. I bought five off eBay for a few dollars.
My Isuzu Dmax manual doesn’t even mention where the fuses are. It turns out they are behind one of the small drawer/holders things beside the steering. (you just pull it out and up, like most cars these days all these things just clip in)
Well, I have explained, and I’ll say it again, that I find no hassle in removing and replacing my dashcam.
The way you describe ‘plugging it back in’, ‘powering it up’ and ‘ensuring the unit is pointing in exactly the right direction’ suggests a major technological procedure…
…which takes me all of ten seconds!
Perhaps you’ve never bothered to even try it!
Anyway, you do things your way and I’ll do them my way.
You seem to be happy with your situation, and I assure you I am happy with mine.
I don’t believe in making problems where none exist, but that’s just me I suppose.
Fitted mine this morning, hardest bit was having to take out the glove box to get to the fuses behind
A further warning is in order in regard to Nextbase Dashcams. It seems some of them don’t allow easy replacement of the rechargeable battery. In general I believe it is folly to buy ANY electrical rechargeable device that doesn’t allow the battery to be swiftly swapped out. Any such device only has a life as long as that battery.
Also as I said before, if you intend to hard wire a dashcam then you should be taking out the batteries and replacing them with capacitors.
Here’s a comment on www.dashcamtalk.com from someone responding to a poster whose battery failed after a year or so:
[I]"I’m guessing you bought this from Halfords over a year ago, so the Warranty has expired?
It’s tolerable if the battery of a £30 G1W fails after a year or so. It’s not acceptable when the battery fails in a £130 Nextbase 402, & the critical final clip being recorded when external power is cut isn’t saved.
Under UK Law, your rights don’t end when the 1 Year Warranty expires…
I think you’re entitled to expect your DashCam to function for at least a couple of years. Exercise your rights.
Also, make a mental note to buy a capacitor-based dashcam next time… "[/I]
I hadn’t realised that the Nextbase dashcams have an internal battery.
My existing one doesn’t; I just plug in the power cable before use.
What purpose does the internal battery serve?
Oh dear guess Realist is against Dashcams for some reason,and that is his right.
Me?.
There are reports on anything depending on having a good or bad experience, but I would not out and out against something if I had not tried/tested/used first
What is up with driving standards today?
A sweeping statement and typical nonsense. Just because a battery is dead doesn’t mean the device is dead. My old GPS has a nearly dead battery but plug it into the car power and it works just fine. The battery actually lasts about 5 to 10 minutes even in its exhausted state after being charged for a while. It is not my current GPS so is rarely used which does the battery no favours but it can be used by visitors.
It would be a similar for Dash Cams even a “dead” battery has a small amount of capacity left.
For those with any basic electronic knowledge just about any device can be dismantled and there are only a limited amount of battery types. However these devices are so cheap that they are probably just replaced when the battery dies.
From what I have read ,an internal battery is a backup, it does not stop a dashcam working . What a battery can do is ,depending on dashcam, record when Movement is in its field of vision when the main power source is switched off. This option is down to personal choice as to having the dashcam enabled or not to use this feature
Unbelievable, isn’t it? I see something like that every day.
What we need is more unmarked police cars, I reckon.
Thanks.
If I want to record whilst the car is parked up, I can simply leave the power cord attached (I usually unplug it). That, of course, depends upon how long I am leaving it, although I can’t imagine it flattening my car battery for a couple of hours.
Wow . . . . ok.
When a device is recording it does so in chunks. The size of those chunks on some dashcams is configurable. You can have lots of small chunks, say 1 chunk every 30 seconds, or a smaller number of large chunks of say 5 mins each.
How you configure the device will depend on your preference. If you are reviewing an accident including the minutes before, during and after the incident, would you prefer that to be all one continuous stream of video, like a YouTube clip? Or would you prefer it to be 50 separate small bits of video that have to be viewed separately or put together using some video software (=hassle for some)?
Why is this an issue?
Because if you have chosen to record longer chunks (say 2-3 mins each) then when you stop your car and switch off the engine, the camera still needs to complete writing that chunk to the SD card. Without a battery, you would be switching off the power when you switched the engine off (if hard wired or if your power socket isn’t always on). That would result in that last chunk of video being lost and not recorded.
That could be the vital footage of the accident just at the point the collision resulted in your engine switching off.
There may also be delay/lag in the entire recording process so it may affect more than one chunk of video.
So the battery power is important for ensuring video writes are completed.
Aside from that, having a battery means you can remove the dashcam from the car (if it’s not integrated) and use it as a digi cam yourself. Maybe using it to walk around the accident scene, film the damage to cars and so on.
Bruce is correct that any device can be opened up by a competent “tinkerer” and with a bit of Googling you could identify and order a replacement battery, whip out a soldering iron and fit it. For most people though this is undesirable, not least because doing so would invalidate any warranty left on the device.
I stick to my personal preferences/recommendations which are that a dashcam should be tiny, discrete and integrated and therefore should be fitted with capacitors not rechargeable batteries. That will guarantee longevity and mean you don’t need to keep removing the device every time you leave the car.
Ideally I would have bought 2 of the Mobius Action Cams (about £50 each). One I would integrate in the mirror housing and fit with capacitors. The other I would leave as is, with a rechargeable battery and keep aside to use to film the accident scene by hand.
Well, thanks for that information.
My dashcam, without internal battery, records in chunks of 5 minutes (I think) until the power connection is removed. Regardless of the point within that 5 minute period, the recording is saved up to the point the power is removed.
I don’t need the dashcam outside of the car as I’d use my smartphone camera in such situations.
So I can see why some people might find an internal battery useful, but I really don’t need one myself. Even if I bought one of those models, I don’t think I’d need the internal battery.
But thanks for the information.
To be fair, the two dashcams I have haven’t got long battery lives - they last about 3 mins. after they’ve been unplugged from the cigar lighter/accessory socket so aren’t much cop for independent filming.
Decided to get a dashcam for my Nissan xtrail tenka 2015 model from a national retail outlet . Thought some members might be interested on how I am getting on with it. Apart from the usual questions of cost etc it was easy to install, with reservations, at least on my car. First did I want it plugged into cigar lighter (easy option) or hard wire to a fuse. First was finding out if the cigar lighter socket was always live (not a good idea as the dashcam could drain the battery) or if it was switched to come on with the ignition? I tried this with my wifes car as well and both were live all the time, so I gave up that idea had this gismo to check which made it easy.
http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u217/bazza104/_DSC0791%20Copy.jpg
So it was a case of what is called hard wired. Couple of things came to my mind don’t piggyback (came with hard wire kit) to anything to do with safety - some muppet I read piggybacked to part of the ABS system… The spare fuse point was always live so that was no good , in the end the heated front seat fuses seemed the best option. Have to say at this point the fuse board was right behind the glovebox, the most stupid place ever thought of. So removal of glovebox had to be done and then got access to the fuses.
Ok piggyback done and earth connected to a mounting screw, so now where to put the Dashcam camera unit? everywhere shows passanger side of rear view mirror. With my car there is a lot of rain sensing mesh which the sucker cup won’t attach to so had to put on the passanger front piller side. Next was feeding the cable down to the hard wire kit, that was the easy bit , and plugging the two together.and then after securing exceess cable refitting the glove box.
One problem is the wipers do not cover where the camera is so might have to move it over later, good idea to put a lot of slack cable into the roof lining ,saves taking everything apart again.
Now you may ask why bother? after all it is not necessary to have one. I only wish i had one when some nutter came around a corner too fast ,slide on the ice with his little peugot 205? and hit my Lexus RX SE-L ,which was in snow mode, so hard he pushed me backwards into a 6 ft deep ditch beside the road. His car was written off and mine had £9,000 of damage. To make it worse his insurance said it was my fault until 18 months later and court date set they backed down and paid into court.
If I had a dashcam there would be no arguement.
May be of interest or not it is up to members
Well, as stocks of the very popular Mobius Action Cameras seem to have been replenished at the main supplying stores, I have today finally ordered a couple.
You can see how tiny and discrete these units are and yet they record superb HD footage. I will use one as a dashcam and keep the other with me most times in case I ever want to record anything. At that tiny size it is no hassle at all to carry around. It’s basically the same as a car remote key.
I also have the option of detaching the lens and, using a special extension cable, positioning it away from the main unit. So I could for example drill a small hole in the ceiling console that houses the cabin lights and rain sensitive wiper sensor and cite the unit in there. That would be an incredibly discrete option with nothing but the tiny lens showing.
Looking forward to playing with them.
It certainly looks a useful bit of kit. How does it attach to the car/windscreen?
Do you have a link to the web site?
You can buy these from:
or
or
There are a range of accessories available including different mounts. By default the device comes with the little “holster”/cradle shown below:
Note that the underside of that cradle has a standard tripod screw fitting but it can be simply removed if not needed (as shown in the above pic)
You can also buy suction cup fittings too and given the cradle has that standard tripod fitting you could buy just about any screen suction cup fitting if you wanted.
Thanks Realist.
That’s pretty good for £50 (although the second outlet charges £75!).
The daylight recording video is very clear for number plates, but I wonder what the night time recording quality is like.
Anyway, I’ve bookmarked all three links.
Worth noting that there are different versions of the Mobius camera on the market. The one you want is version 3 (V3) as it has a bigger battery in it so can record longer.
Different versions are priced differently
OK, thanks. 
