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  22 out of 23 members found this review helpful

  PanagiotisDr.

  2024-07-12

  Let me start with the most important reason someone would choose this camera, the image quality.
  Without exaggeration, it has an excellent image, clear, distinct, with accurate colors, and the HDR is indeed real HDR and not some fake effect that many other cameras claim to have.
  You can easily distinguish license plates and details at a distance that with other cameras you can only dream of.
  If I had to describe the image in a few words, I would say that it easily outperforms many GoPro models, especially the older ones!
  Even at night in a rural area with no other lighting besides the car lights, the noise is minimal and visibility at a relative distance is ample, while for example, at tunnel exits, the HDR does an excellent job and just before exiting the tunnel, you can still see some faint details outside the tunnel where the sun is shining, while all the other cameras I have seen and tested simply "burn" the frame displaying a bright glare.
  The work they have done on the 70Mai algorithm with video resolution is truly exceptional, I did not expect this from a dashcam!
  The image is very wide-angle, covering the entire windshield and the pillars comfortably, while the angle can easily be changed since the lens moves accordingly.
  The camera's WiFi is quite fast (at least compared to other dashcam WiFi I have tested) and transfers a "SOS" file of about 120MB to the mobile phone in about a minute.
  Also, in the accessories, there are simple hardwire kits (to operate the parking mode) and hardwire kits with a 4G adapter (to insert a SIM card and view the camera in the car in real-time on the mobile phone, as well as the GPS stamp) and a Polarized filter to prevent reflections on the glass from the sun and greatly improve the camera's clarity.
  What I appreciated the most and truly took my hat off to the camera for is that at night, license plates are clearly visible even on moving vehicles!
  I have no idea how they managed to do this; I have never seen any other camera achieve this.
  I suspect that due to HDR, the camera takes two shots with different exposure times, one normal and one very fast and dark, to capture details, and then combines these two shots into one (this is also the principle of real HDR operation).

  And here the positives end!

  The construction is made of matte black plastic, which due to its shape and material is permanently exposed under the sun behind the windshield without a way to reduce the temperature. Other cameras, for example, use metal in the camera's body (many Nextbase models do this, for example) or the body is positioned slightly further back in relation to the lens to "hide" from the car's sky and be exposed only the lens near the glass and under the sun, but not this one!
  This camera looks like a small heater if you touch it, in a summer month with a parked car and a turned-off camera, I measured it with an infrared thermometer and it reached 63 degrees Celsius!
  You might say, is that so bad?
  Yes! because the all-knowing Chinese have put a regular lithium battery inside instead of a capacitor, resulting in:
  1. the battery being a fire hazard due to temperature
  2. the prediction for the battery's life (and the camera's) to be extremely limited.
  So this camera is actually intended for more northern countries, which have fewer heat and temperature, and not Mediterranean countries, unless you cover the car with a hood every time, so you automatically forget about the parking mode because simply the camera won't see what's happening around the car.

  The screen is not touch, but the camera actually has physical buttons, which is good (in my opinion), basically anything inside the car that is not touch and has buttons to operate it is good because it doesn't distract you from driving and you can press it with touch (I'm not saying it, all the committees and organizations for road safety say it, but the car manufacturers ignore it), but the problem here with the buttons is that if the screen is off, to save a video, it's not enough to press the "SOS" button once, but you have to press any button first to turn on the screen, wait a second for the menu to appear next to each button, and THEN press the "SOS" button.
  The simplest function of dashcams, the Chinese managed to turn it into a science...

  The rear camera is simply tragically awful.
  The colors are washed out, the contrast is nonexistent, the resolution (although it's 1080p) looks like interpolated 720p, while the noise is present everywhere and always, the license plates can only be distinguished at very short distances, and at night the videos are simply decorative.
  The image reminds you of a mobile phone from 2008.

  On the other hand, despite the extremely good image quality, the technical specifications of the video are also tragically awful.
  In 70mai, they claim that their super camera records at an incredible and amazing 25 frames per second!
  Indeed, the generated video files are H.265 at 31000kbps and 25fps.
  OK, other 4K cameras record at 30 and 60fps, but with such image quality, somewhere it has to lack.
  Only that the camera actually doesn't record even at 25fps but somewhere around 21-22fps!
  By opening the original video and going frame by frame, there are some frames that are duplicated and repeated, the camera places them together to reach the number 25 frames per second and save the video.
  Anyone can see it by searching for video reviews of the camera on YouTube that the motion of the video, especially all the way to the right and all the way to the left, is not smooth at all but "choppy".
  This happens because the actual video is 21-22 frames, and the camera inserts duplicate frames so that the marketing department of 70Mai can claim that their video is 25fps!
  And of course, almost no review mentions this for obvious reasons!

  Searching for a solution to the above problem, I disabled HDR, changed the video compression from "High quality" to normal, tried various other things but with no result.
  What had an effect was changing the refresh rate from 60Hz (NTSC) to 50Hz (PAL) and finally the camera recorded at 25fps.
  I can't understand why 50Hz is not the default setting since the camera doesn't work properly!
  The useless information I discovered was that if I disconnect the rear camera, magically the camera recorded at 30fps!
  Obviously, the rear camera is 25fps and in order for the front camera to keep up with the potato that accompanies it in the box, it also records at 25fps!
  This is what burying a product by the manufacturer means!

  You will tell me, OK, no one intends to shoot a movie with a dashcam and all they care about is the image quality and clear distant details. I agree! And here lies the biggest failure of this particular camera and the reason for my rating: The "SOS" videos that the camera will automatically save in case of an accident. All dashcams, when we press the "SOS" button, save the previous 10-15 seconds and the next 30-60 seconds. The same happens when they detect a collision on their own. This camera saves the previous... two (2) seconds and the next 30! Which means that whether we press the button ourselves or it is activated automatically due to a collision, we will not have in the video what happened before the collision, a violation of STOP, a behavior that led to an accident, etc. We should be able (alive, standing, and with access to the camera) to search the memory for the normal camera videos and copy the crucial video before it is automatically deleted by the camera. Of course, even in the above simple copy of the "SOS" video, 70mai managed to put obstacles there too! The normal "simple" videos can be 1, 2, or 3 minutes long, but when we press the "SOS" button, the normal video, regardless of the point it has reached, is cut off, and the 30-second "SOS" video starts from there. So, in order to keep/store the crucial video and what preceded it, we have to find the video we pressed the button for in the "SOS" folder and then in the "normal" folder (which contains dozens or even hundreds of videos) the video it recorded before we pressed the button! With all this process, it is understood that the video of a collision will be "cut" into two different files, what preceded it and what was saved, and we will have to merge them into one file if we want to use them. And of course, all this is the process only for the front camera, for the rear one, we have to do all the above from the beginning! I have never seen such a huge failure in a dashcam! It really gives the impression that at 70mai, either they have never driven or it is the first camera for a car that anyone has ever made! If I hadn't managed to pass the cables inside the car and if the image quality, especially the clarity of the license plates, wasn't really that good, I would have packed it and sent it back to get a refund. The image quality is the only reason for the two stars, if it didn't have that, it wouldn't even be worth the minimum. In short, for entertainment purposes, it may be the best camera in its price category! But for safety reasons, it's a failure!

  Translated from Greek · Show original

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