Keith Lobo

hi all, have any of you fitted a camera in your cars to catch those vagrants who dent your door panels or scratch your paint?

I'm looking for something that records even when the car is parked and which doesn't have all the ugly wires hanging out. Probably something that sits neatly behind the rear view mirror?

Any suggestions appreciated. thank you

JediJD

I'm in the middle of that process right now and I'll throw in my $.02. My daughter's ML350 was badly raked in a college parking lot with no cameras, and that started the search. I read all the posts on MBWorld and some were pertinent...none seemed to completely address my particular circumstances (although I possibly overlooked something that was comprehensive and well written, if so, my apologies). It made sense to think in terms of solutions for my wife's GLE400 at the same time. The result for us wasn't cheap. Neither the wife or daughter wanted a big obtrusive box on the window, or stuff dangling down, or wires showing. I wanted fairly high sensitivity in case of any impact or scratch (like a parking lot buggy). I wanted front and rear coverage, both while driving and while parked (sometimes for more than 12 hours at a time when the daughter was at the school all day). I wanted the video to store in the cloud and ultimately decided for older ML350 to go FHD (full high definition) at 60fps and save a few bucks over 4k even though the cost difference wasn't huge. I wasn't really worried about video of inside the car (she doesn't use the car for rideshare and frankly I'm not sure I want to have video of the interior of my daughter's car) and I ended up with a Blackvue DR750S-2CH and a Celllink Neo6 dedicated battery backup for the daughter. The problem, as I understand it, is that all of these systems take a lot of juice to run them when the car is parked, and especially if you have front and rear, your regular battery is probably only good for 2-3 hours before you have exhausted the car battery. In my wife's case, she didn't need it to record for a long time, but I thought 4k might make a difference and recording through factory tint was a little bit of an issue so I ordered the Blackvue DR900s and a Power Magic Pro interface...it wires into the car and monitors battery voltage. If the car battery falls below a certain level, it shuts down the video instead of depleting the battery. Total for the wife's car just under $500. The units are very small, seem very well made, and it looks like I can take them out when we sell or trade the daughter's car at some point (I don't see us needing to do that with the wife's anytime soon, but it looks like we could). I think my cost, all in for the daughter's car, including a 32G SD card was $679.99 including shipping from Blackboxmycar.com. The wife's doesn't need the battery I could have gotten it a few bucks cheaper if I had shopped a little differently, and there are apparently some processes to use similar (knock off isn't fair, but sort of) products as cheap as $80 plus wiring in a couple of LiOn battery packs from Amazon for $20 each to do a similar job. For various reasons I spent the additional money and although I thought I was going to install it myself (and it didn't look that hard) have scheduled install with a local stereo shop for >$100 but the hardwiring apparently isn't out of the range of a DIY.

There are some 'gotchas' to keep in mind. We live in Atlanta and sometimes travel to Florida. I didn't want or need the video reviewable in the car, so loading it wirelessly to either my home network, or phone or the cloud was a lot more important to me than replaying it in the car on a viewfinder. If the cameras are left to bake in hot cars, it can affect the camera and the battery...so that was a factor. Also, with multiple cars in the family, and dad ultimately being responsible for all of them working, I wanted a brand that had products that covered af full spectrum for different car applications, but I wanted similar software, and operational controls so that I spent as little time relearning instructions as possible. GPS wasn't a huge deal for me, but the more I looked into 4k, the more sense it made for the wife's car at least. Since the entire idea is recording, then the more pixels you can slam into the video the better you can possibly determine information you may need but the tradeoff is that the more pixels you have, the more you are stuffing into the SD card, so the less loop recording you have on a 32G storage. Finally, I feel like I'm super cheap, and I hate spending the money but the parking lot damage to my daughter's car was right at $1k, and I think I would have had the bas*&^& if I had video, making it at least not a stupid purchase. I don't have time to screw with imore time on install videos and making stuff work like MacGyver, I want something that is designed to work out of the box, and work with my cars, and not require me to repair it or figure out why it doesn't work the way it should. Your results may vary. I considered Thinkware and Blacksys systems also and probably could have saved a buck or two but for various reasons didn't. Looked at Rexring and Garmin and thought they were a notch or two below the others. Sorry if the pictures are too big...couldn't see an easy way to shrink them. FWIW, I don't know or care about the company I bought from...they seemed legit but I don't have any particular allegiance to either the company or the brands; I looked for better pricing options, and didn't see any, buy you might. Finally, the one thing I haven't completely gotten my arms around is...how can you automate turning the things off in your home garage? I don't want storage looping when I'm parked at home, or threatening the battery life...wondering if I can build a subroutine of some sort that works off proximity, but I haven't figured that all out yet...I'll update when I do.

MMerc43

Yep, I fitted HD front and rear cameras and 360 radar myself. Need to pull back some of the headlining but wasn't that long or difficult.
Will see if I cab dig up my install pics if that's helpful