2.0" TFT LCD 8 LED Car HD 720P DVR Camera Recorder TF/USB Port 270°Rotation (H190)

Its a fantastic product, I must say i am very impressed with. Although I knocked of one star for two reasons:

1) the product itself feels a little plastic like (feels cheap)

2) the description of the product does not state the type of card, and where I also made a mistake by ordering a 32gb SDHC card waste fully, but actually the card that works on this product is MICRO SD cards. Please don't make the same mistake that I did!!

I was encouraged to buy this product knowing it was a HD device, but really it is not. It will write in the HD format of 1280x720 but it's lens is most definitely not capable of HD. So perhaps the most important observation is, that in my opinion, the quality is similar to that of a VHS recording in LP mode. You can only rarely read a car license plate even in daylight, and then only with difficulty. I could not even read my own car number plate at a distance of 8 metres (it was stationary of course!) while my phone's camera, also set at vga resolution, captures it clearly.

I think it would have limited use as evidence in an accident, especially since it does not have any GPS data, such as speed, breaking time etc. There is very little difference in resolution between HD and VGA recordings. AVI capture results in large file size. Would have been better using a compressed format such as .H264. Small files and better quality, although with such a mediocre lens I doubt there would be any improvement.

So firstly my unit was already charged and the date was set correctly. I suspect it was a customer return! The instructions are not perfect English but the menu's are easy to navigate. (The CD DOES read in MS Office Word 2007 by the way). I did go through the menu's but changed very little. I selected the 15 minutes recording length and the couriously named "Light Freq" to 50hz, which is correct for PAL. 60hz is supposedly for NTSC, however as far as I know these settings are obsolete with an AVI file.

I attached it to the upper side of my windscreen to the left of my mirror, so the cable would not get in the way. Not so good if you have a passenger though. NOTE: that for a short journey you could presumably run it from the internal battery and that saves having the 12v cable connected. You would have to ensure that it does not run down though, and you would have to manually start the recording. I did also have my Garmin sat-nav in use at the same time (I have a two way 12v output device). Contrary to the Amazon listing, it did not cause any interference to my Garmin C510 sat-nav. The suction seems very good, it did not fall off the screen yet and road bumps and humps don't shake it much. I found it best to angle the lens down to eliminate the sky as much as possible, otherwise you get a very dark picture, especially on a cloudy day. Even so, it hunts for the correct exposure and the brighness changes often. The mounting allows just about any angle of viewing, including the reverse for internal CCTV monitoring. I think this item would be perfect for that, say in a taxi or mini-bus.

The recordings:
Audio is appaling quality. Thin and muffled. When the engine is running the audio becomes very distorted. In the Amazon listing it says you can turn it off, but you cannot. You could presumably put tape over the mic if privacy is an issue. I have already commented about video quality, but just to say that I think a 150 degree angle is excessive. 120 degrees would be adequate. Colours are not perfect but are acceptable. My only real gripe is the lens quality, despite it claiming to have "500 million pixels . I suspect that all car camera's in this price range are of similar quality and for the price you will probably not find anything better, but for serious use the video resolution is a big problem if litigation or an insurance claim is involved.

I don't think Amazon allows me to insert an external link here, but if anyone wants to view two video's (1 HD & 1 vga- both in daylight) made on this camera, then PM me and I will make them available for you.

This item is currently being used in a taxi as cctv. Picture quality is excellent and so far no problems. Remember and set the time and date on the card.