Dash Cams

Front, dual, and parked-mode dash cams, judged on what owners get back from real commutes. What the footage looks like at night, which memory cards survive, and how to hardwire without draining your battery.

A dash cam has one job that matters, and it is not resolution. A plate you cannot read is a video you cannot use, so we go after the sample footage owners post at the moment a car pulls away rather than trusting the 4K badge on the box. Headlights and wet tarmac at night defeat plenty of cameras that look excellent in daylight: the sensor blows out the plate into a white rectangle, or the bitrate is low enough that the digits smear across two frames. The reviews say at what distance and what speed owners report a plate stayed legible, and where it stopped.

Memory cards are the quiet failure. A dash cam writes continuously and overwrites itself all day, which is the exact workload that kills an ordinary card in a few months, usually without telling anybody until the day somebody needs the file. High-endurance cards exist for this reason and cost a few euros more. We note which cameras warn you when the card degrades and which ones just stop.

Parking mode is where the wiring question shows up. A hardwire kit pulls from the fuse box with a low-voltage cutoff so the camera stops before the battery cannot start the car, and the cutoff value is the setting people never check. We give the drain the kit is rated for and the hours owners report it bought.

Filming in public is legal in most places, but keeping and publishing footage of identifiable people is regulated separately, particularly in Europe. Each review mentions what applies before it mentions the price.