Kenwood DRV-A601W
A solid 4K dash cam without the bells and whistles.
Kenwood might be a name associated with bass-heavy in-car sound systems from the good old days of car customisation, but it currently offers a solid selection of aftermarket head units – many complete with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – and a neat line of high-definition dash cams.
The DRV-A601W here is arguably its flagship model, boasting a neat and compact exterior body, 3-inch full-color LCD touchscreen and 3840 x 2160 (8.3M pixels) recording capabilities for capturing crisp footage from the front window.
Although available as a standalone camera, Kenwood is also keen to push its KCA-R200 rear-view camera, which tethers easily to this unit, as well as the CA-DR1030 hard-wiring kit. The latter allows owners to tap into the vehicle’s fuse board and gets around the sticky issue of cameras powering down when modern start/stop engine tech kicks in.
Setting up the Kenwood DRV-A601W is simple, requiring a quick clip of the main camera body into the GPS-powered suckermount connection. This is aided by a magnetic fixing, which makes it easy to clip together – but feels overly aggressive to remove. In fact, when sucker-mounted to a windscreen, it’s hard to get the camera off this magnetic mount without inadvertently pulling the sucker from the glass too.
As with many modern dash cams, the set-up process is fairly quick and simple, with merely location, date and time required upon startup. The camera automatically selects full 4K resolution for video-recording purposes, but there’s an obvious menu on the main screen for reducing this quality should you want to store a greater number of clips. After all, the camera will automatically delete any older or unchecked clips and replace them as the included 64GB memory card becomes full. You can always upgrade to a 256GB card if you need.
Video quality is excellent and the High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology does a good job of lifting shadows and generally improving the overall quality of clips captured in harsh highlight situations or overly monotone moments, such as driving through tunnels.
The 4K footage is easily good enough to read number plates from a distance and, despite a lack of mention of in-body stabilisation, is incredibly smooth over rough road surfaces. That said, image quality lacks behind some rivals in low-light or night-time situations, where models from Garmin, BlackVue and Viofo perform exceptionally well.
Crisp 4K footage, built-in GPS, and the ability to hardwire into the car’s battery to avoid annoying engine start/stop issues make this a reliable dash cam for capturing footage. But unlike some modern rivals, it lacks the fancy extras, such as emergency breakdown location transmission and over-the cloud CCTV.
Leon Poultney