OT: recommendations for a "dash cam"

[Andrew Stadler]

Hi,

Asked by the spouse of a cyclist friend to recommend some sort of dashcam for them (for a gift).  I know very little about these beyond having played with my son's GoPro a few times.

There are plenty of online "review" sites and I don't trust any of 'em.

Interested in positive or negative reviews.

Thanks,

Andy

[Scott Crosby]

well I just bought a Cycliq Fly 6/12 combo but haven’t installed yet. will advise when have some impressions. meanwhile, DC Rainmaker is pretty trustworthy I think. he reviewed an older version:

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/11/cycliq-fly6ce-fly12ce-first-look.html

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[Darrin Ward]

i actually just also bought and received the fly6 (the backwards light camera).
haven't really used it yet. will let you know.

i have previously used the go pro but honestly found it to not work
too well for my purposes.
i am sure its great if i wanted one off ultra hi res recording of some
special sports trick that i am doing.
as a i just want to record my ride to work, it was kind of tedious.
the bike mounts are ridiculously expensive. fuck you k-edge for being
70 dollars and breaking on my first ride.
the software (when i was using it) was oriented towards giving you
lots of options and i accidentally got into weird menus when i just
wanted to record. kind of dslr vs phone camera. i actually want the
phone camera here. idiot proof.
also the defaults were always super high res. i dont need 8k res of
my ride down folsom to the office.

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[Zak Jarvis]

It is a sort of DIY solution, but cheap:

Wyze 3 camera and a USB power bank. It's billed as a connected,
cloud-based thing, but will cheerfully just record directly to a
microSD card with no internet connectivity whatsoever.

Camera costs $35 and a halfway modern USB powerbank and SD card gives
you about 30 continuous hours of recording in a bog-standard
fileformat without stabilization in 1080p at a low bitrate.

It's outdoor rated (and I've had one running continuously in my back
yard in Pacifica for about 2 months straight, which already makes it
one of the most durable outdoor gizmos I've put in the yard -- nothing
survives our sea fog for long).

There are no off-the-shelf mounting solutions for a bike, but I'd be
happy to 3d print one for SF2G peeps.

Downside: there's no on-camera review of footage, but their phone app
has pretty good tools for review when you do have access to wifi. I'd
suggest making it its own private network since the company's security
history has been a bit of a dumpster fire, but it's entirely possible
to avoid that.

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[Brett Lider]

I was not super impressed with the Cycliq's a couple of years ago. The firmware update process was very tedious - it required a computer as opposed to doing it via BT or WiFi. I am not sure if that has gotten better or not.

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[Ben Kochie]

The firmware process is much better now, but they're still not great.

I bought a set of the fly6 and fy12 CE models. They lasted about 3 years before now being dead.

From what I can tell, they are not waterproof enough for any rain riding. I took the fly6 apart and it was corroded around the USB socket on the board. There was no conformal coating on the board either, which is a really weird thing to skip in a sports device.

But, I haven't found anything better yet, so I bought a fly6 v3. So far it seems a little bit better designed than the original and 2nd gen.

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[Martin Strauss]

I bought a fly6 and fly12 a few years ago, and learned that you can't mount your fly12 too close to your Garmin or it interferes with the GPS reception. Some research online determined that lots of people have noticed this, but in my various emails with Cycliq support they categorically denied that this was possible, and even if it was happening, then I must have a defective Garmin. So I sighed and experimented with different handlebar mounting until my Garmin got GPS reception again, and left pretty convinced never to buy Cycliq products again.

Also my fly6 seems to go from 100% charge to "emergency low battery mode" in about one hour of riding, which is already frustrating enough, but "emergency low battery mode" also comes with a panicked "beep beep" at 60 second intervals calculated to drive you insane.

Though I haven't seen any other product that remotely meet the "dashcam" use case, so I'm still using my fly6/fly12 for now...

M

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