What’s the Best Smallest Dash Cam?

Hey guys this is John from us dash camera today I got a review on that DD Pi mini now this is a pretty cool camera because it’s really affordable and it has a lot of features but not only that it actually looks a lot fancier than what you’d expect for the price now this was sent to me for review by gearbest so I’ll provide a link down below like usual as of recording it’s currently at seventy dollars and 98 cents so it’s really cheap now one of the things that caught my eye is I’m a really big black view fan I like their black cylinder design and that’s what this one looks like but it’s even smaller than any of the black view cameras so it is a Chinese camera and here’s some of the features so it does do 1080p at 30 frames per second in h.264 encoding it does have a Sony inch x more CMOS sensor aperture with a 140 degree wide angle sports up to 32 gigabytes and besides having Wi-Fi it also has a wireless remote that can take pictures or video clips and save them to your phone so it’s pretty cool not sure what any of this really means sure it’s some sort of warranty card the packaging is pretty nice I like that it actually looks like high-quality because a lot of cameras from China come in very generic boxes so it does come with an instruction booklet a lot of this packaging reminds me of Apple seems like everyone tries to make their packaging like Apple spin that way for many years but sort of nice to see – cameras doing this also in the end it doesn’t really matter if the camera is not good so of course we’re going to give it a thorough testing but at first glance I was very impressed one other thing I will be showing a lot of is the app because the app is very very full and full-featured it’s a lot more than most typical dashcam apps so that’s going to be a big chunk of this review actually so let’s put this away in case I want to look at it later there is actually a parking mode feature that’s not explained at all in instructions I did later look at the instructions but it doesn’t really talked about it I looked online I couldn’t find much online either so I’ll explain that also later in the video so here’s the camera like I said looks a lot like a black view camera it’s bigger than one of the rear black view cameras but it’s smaller than one of the dr 3,500 cameras similarly to the black view cameras it does have this little cover on the side where you put the memory card in then there’s the micro USB for power and a reset switch on that side speaker on the other side so this does actually have voice alerts just like a lot of other Korean brands which I really like here’s the button that allows you to snap pictures or quick video clips to save your phone now there’s one more small box in here with the accessories included there you can see the power adapter it just uses a USB cable here’s a little bag full of a few small accessories like extra adhesives some cable ties a couple plastic pry bars so this is the adapter that you plug the USB cable into you can see it does have a or 1 amp plug so you want to make sure to plug the camera into the amp one and here’s the USB cable and it does have the 90 degree angle plug for the camera side so it’s a pretty basic set one thing this camera doesn’t have is gps but that’s actually something i mentioned many times in the past that i don’t even really need gps that much if i could save money and lose gps I probably would so this little button does use a watch battery so I’ll show you one side real quick just uses a small circular adhesive to stick on to your dashboard or steering wheel and you can see here it’s a pretty standard watch battery cr2032 so we’ll get it into my car now and I’ll let you hear what it sounds like when it turns on so once you download the DD Pi app from the App Store you’ll find it in the SSID list or the Wi-Fi list my password is going to be 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 by default and of course you can change it later so this is what the app icon looks like and this is pretty cool because it’s almost like they’re building a whole social network of DD PI cameras now this first one is trending which for whatever reason didn’t load but this is activity list and this isn’t loading really either because where I live right now sort of a cellular dead spot if I’m not connected to my home Wi-Fi it goes really really slow so it’s it’s not reflective of the DD PI service but again here you can see there’s just a feed of people’s videos that they’re sharing and this is something that I haven’t really seen before and any of the cameras I’ve used so I think it’s really cool so now let’s take a look at the rest of the app of course you can get a live feed with your camera then from the camera it looks like a lot of other Wi-Fi camera apps but there is a lot more to it actually so there you can see the resolution up to 1080p and you might not see what’s going on here but when I hit that second button it’s switching between sixteen by nine or cinema mode so there are black bars that show up on top this camera button allows you to either capture a picture or a 10-second video clip each time you push that button the first time I looked at this I didn’t even know what they were talking about when I hit that button now with this feature you can actually trim video clips or actually combine really long clips together and it’s really intuitive or really easy all you do is just select these bars on the bottom set them to the time you want you can flip through all your videos based on the time they were recorded very easily then once you find a clip you want you just hit this download button there you can see it says it’s starting this is only going to be about a 15 to 30 second long clip I’m sure but it’s a good example so now let’s go ahead and take a look in the file list now that top left on 13 seconds is the one I just saved so I think this is a really cool feature to be able to combine clips or edit clips in the app is something that I think all the apps should have because a lot of dash cam apps are really simple so I like that DD Pi is actually putting a lot more effort into it here you can see there’s a share button when you’re reviewing a clip so you can share it in a text message Facebook any of your cloud storage shapes appear you can save it to your phone you can favorite it and then this one that you can’t really see because of the white cloud is repeat so if you hit that it’ll repeat the video once you finish watching it then there is a delete so again that’s a pretty cool feature now going back to the live view feed some of these options actually are in multiple places in the app so it might be a little redundant but there you can see you can mute it you can take a picture the video clip there I accidentally went to the file list then on that bottom left is the camera settings so in the camera settings you can change the password here and the name of the camera here’s the volume adjust and James Gunn now recording with sound I typically recommend always having your audio recording on capture with video clip means when you hit that button if it’s activated it’ll save that ten-second clip so I’ll turn that on image quality again full HD which is also found on the Live View menu video mode which is was talking about before the sixteen by nine or the cinema mode cinema mode and in the Advanced Settings you can see the park park guard is like a parking mode with time-lapse recording so when you do Park guard with time-lapse recording it will actually only record one frame per second here you can see a just pared the button so then we got the date and time display or start song is to disable a sound it plays when the camera turns on and the G sensor sensitivity so it does have some pretty in-depth storage management so it does give you a pretty visual display on how much you’re using even shows that graph along the bottom then the last feature we have is the camera info there is one more menu where you have your user so this is where you can actually customize your profile and people can follow you just just like Twitter or Spotify in a way and then a lot of these settings are very similar but you can see here there’s just some more storage info then you can set whether or not your phone will actually download the clips when you click that button so these are lot of redundant options again but here’s some more info so I wanted to demonstrate the button and I’m going to throw something up on the dashboard and then hit that button you’ll see the light turn blue then when we come over here I got to refresh it and you’ll see it’ll start downloading the file sometimes it doesn’t show up right away so if you back out and go back in it’ll actually start downloading you’ll see when I play the file that it actually saves a few seconds before I hit the button which is pretty nice if you put the button on your steering wheel you could probably capture some clips pretty easily if your thumb is on it or near it all the time so here you can see it’s right next to my black view dr650 to channel so it is quite a bit smaller but it like I said it’s bigger than the rear camera on the black view so now let’s take a look at some video clips and this is probably the biggest downfall of this camera while it is 1080p 30 it is pretty low bitrate hitting around 8 megabits per second so while the colors do look nice and you can read license plates from a pretty close distance with not much motion going on once there’s a lot of motion it can get harder to actually read license plates so as I passed this SUV on my left you can try pausing it and seeing if you can read the license plate so this camera doesn’t have the best video quality but for $70 camera for how fully developed the app is and how it has the remote button and the way it pairs with your phone to save Clips it’s sort of a trade-off the video quality is definitely good enough if you just want to capture an accident but you might be out of luck if someone hit-and-runs you now the other cool feature I’ll show in just one second and it’ll go really quickly you’ll see it looks like it’s in fast motion that’s actually the parking guard with time-lapse mode so now I’ll slow it down to 0.125 times the speed so what I did is I hooked it up to the Vico vation hardware and Kittur I just have to plug the 12 volt socket into the vehicle vation hard wiring kit and my car still powers it all my cars off and then after a while camera senses it hasn’t been moving for a while and starts recording this parking guard mode and here you’ll see me coming up so well it’s different than other parking features I’ve used it works surprisingly well because each frame is really clear so I can pause it and see myself very clearly so here’s some night footage now the night footage while the brightness seems to be okay it does look very blurry and grainy so it’s not that great but again for the price $70 and how many other features this camera has it’s pretty cool it’s not like the night footage is so terrible you wouldn’t be able to make out the color of a car you know it’s not that bad my headlights actually light up the road just fine compared to some previous cameras I’ve used but if you really want the best quality footage or really good night footage this definitely isn’t the camera for you now one thing to point out you can hear the sound is actually in these night clips the microphone is not very great it’s very muffled and now I normally drive around with music playing but that will get flagged for copyright when the there is music playing and I’ve listened to clips it sounds very muffled so it’s not the best audio quality either but at the same time you’d be able to hear a conversation and that’s really what matters I think or you would be able to hear say tires screeching right before a car hit you so overall I feel like if you can get over the low bitrate and the less than stellar video quality especially the night video quality I think this is a very great option it’s very comparable to a black view camera in features and form and I know a lot of people don’t like the black view cameras but they still are very good sellers so a lot of people out there still like them the cheapest black view camera I believe is around $120 and that doesn’t include Wi-Fi or GPS this camera doesn’t include GPS either but it does have Wi-Fi it does have a parking mode and it does have a really nice form factor it’s small sleek it’s black so it’s not as noticeable in your window it really is a great package and again for only about 70 dollars now that $70 price is from gearbest who like I said sent this unit out for review so I will provide a link down below now they don’t always have it in stock I’ll provide a link to Amazon also but it’s about $30 more on Amazon but even at $100 I do believe that’s actually a pretty good deal for this camera now another thing I should mention comparing it to black view again is I think this app is way better than black views app and black tea has been around for years so I’m not totally sure how long DD PI has been around but they seemed more relatively new to me at least and for how fully developed and nice-looking their app is that really impressed me one you say thought of using this camera for is a rear camera because there’s still a lot of to channel cameras that have a 720p rear camera or they might have full 1080p front and rear but then the bit rates not that great most people pull into parking spots so I would really recommend using this in the rear window and having it to connect it to something like the vehicle vision and I’ll provide a link to the review of that too if you don’t know what I’m talking about and then using the parking guard with a time lapse mode it would make a pretty nice parking camera or parking guard camera for a cheap price then upfront you know you could use something with better video quality for when you’re driving but this would do good enough just to record a hit and run in a parking lot where the motion is going to be slow anyways so that pretty much wraps up my review of the D hi Minnie obviously I really liked it and recommend it if you liked this video or my other videos I’d appreciate if you hit like and subscribe as usual drive safe thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time…