Police Camera Action
They’re growing in popularity, and it’s not hard to see why – Dan gets a Nextbase dash-cam.
Although my driving history is somewhat chequered (two vehicle ‘inversions’, three writeoffs, two bans, and more points than I care to remember) I have been a good boy for many years. My licence is currently clean, and I’ve had no ‘vehicular mishaps’ for ages. I intend to keep it that way, but I’m constantly aware that an accident could be just around the next bend, especially when navigating the narrow B-roads around where I live. It’s not uncommon for me to come to a complete halt, while the oncoming driver continues without so much as lifting off, clattering the passenger side of their car through the hedgerow at speed!
A mate of mine had a nasty head-on in similar circumstances – he was stationary, yet because of the ‘one person’s word against another’ nature of the accident it was declared a knock-for-knock.
Which brings me neatly onto the subject of dash-cams. They just make a whole lot of sense to me, especially if you drive a modified car, as the finger of blame is always going to point at you first, unless you can prove otherwise – which is exactly what a dash-cam can do!
There are loads on the market, from the cheap and cheerful, to the all singing, all dancing. It’s kinda pointless if the recorded image isn’t clear (like the rubbish CCTV images you see on Crimewatch) so I went for a Nextbase 402G from Halfords simply press a button and it locks that segment so it can’t be overwritten. The image quality is very impressive even at night, and you’d have no problem making out numberplates, or other details.
It has a whole bunch of useful features including a shock sensor, so if someone hits the car when it’s parked up and drives off, it will record their details (as long as they drive in the camera’s field of view obviously). Just getting into the car is enough to trigger it, so if you get nudged in a carpark it’ll activate the camera. Among other useful features, it also records speed, GPS data and the time of day.
It comes with a long power lead so you can tuck it away out of sight, and I went a bit OCD and bought and mounted an additional 12V socket in the glovebox to make the installation neater, and free up the dash socket.
At the time of writing, the 402G retails at £135, which is a very good price considering what it could save you! Oh, and be warned, it also records audio – and you may be horrified at how bad your singing sounds!
“the image quality is very impressive” dan
as it records in 1080p and is literally ‘plug and play’. You stick it on the windscreen and plug it into the fag lighter and that’s it! It records in 3-5 minute segments, overwriting the oldest segment when the Micro SD card is full. If you have an incident,