GARMING DASH CAM MINI
Simple, compact and stripped of all but the essentials, this is the ideal discreet safety camera
It’s so small it hides behind your rear view mirror. Is it any good? We hit the road to find out
The Dash Cam Mini is probably smaller than your car’s key fob, meaning it fits neatly behind the rear view mirror of most cars, on a smart quick-release mount, where it quietly but reliably gets on with the job of shooting Full HD video and saving it to a microSD card. There’s no touchscreen or display of any kind: one button mutes audio, and larger one saves a section of video when pressed. To view videos, you’ll need to use Wi-Fi. Simple.
The Mini shoots at a lower resolution than most of Garmin’s current dash cam range, but this is still 1080p, which means footage is perfectly sharp and clear. While it lacks HDR, the picture quality is perfectly acceptable for such a small camera – number plates are clearly legible, for example. Given the size and price, we can’t complain. The 140-degree lens angle spans fully from one side of our car to the other, giving a complete view of the road ahead and a little to either side, too. Camera positioning is key here, and thanks to the Mini’s size it is easy to fit right in the middle of your windscreen
without interfering with the rear view mirror. There is no battery inside the Mini, but it comes with everything you need for powering it.
The free Garmin Drive app helps you position the camera, by sending a live video feed from the camera to your phone over Wi-Fi. You can also use the app to adjust a couple of settings, but generally you won’t need it (which is good, because connecting was a bit patchy).
Another feature of the Drive app is the ability to set up several Garmin dash cams at once. That way, you can stick a Mini on both your front and rear screens.
It really is a case of ‘set-it-and-forget-it’, with the camera recording video constantly until the microSD card gets full, at which point the oldest footage is overwritten. There isn’t even a beep when it is powered on and off, which we like - just a small status light. When a collision is detected (or you press the save button) this footage is saved separately and will not be overwritten, so you can extract it from the microSD card if needed.
It is perhaps a little on the expensive side, given it lacks GPS. The Garmin Dash Cam 55 from 2018 is now around $250 and comes with extra features like a touch screen, voice control and speed warnings – but if you don’t need them, this is just about an ideal choice.