Vantrue T2 dashcam makes an excellent driving companion
Plenty of inexpensive dashcams can give you the basics. They power up and start recording automatically, they can record over older footage so you never need to swap out memory cards, and most offer a generously wide-angle lens with 1080p recording.
If this sounds good to you, you’ll have no problem finding a decent budget dashcam for under $100.
But a dashcam can do a lot more than this, and Vantrue is betting the extra features packed into its T2 model justifies its relatively expensive $209 price tag.
Those features include high dynamic range (HDR) recording, a parking sentry mode, and a super-capacitor, which lets you hardwire the T2 directly into your vehicle’s battery via the OBDII port. Vantrue offered a T2 to the Driving. ca team to test, so we gave it a try.
Bigger isn’t always better: The first thing you notice about the T2 is its size. Though not as big as some of the biggest cams on the market, its long, octagonal-barrel body makes for a highly visible addition to your windshield. When you take into consideration the bulk of the camera’s included suction-cup mount, it’s the equivalent of hanging a second, smaller rear-view mirror in your peripheral vision.
It’s not a deal-breaker, but we were hard-pressed to find a location on the small windshield of our Mazda3 test vehicle that didn’t uncomfortably obstruct our view of the outside world.
The downside of needing to place the camera further from the driver is it puts the device and its buttons out of easy reach.
That’s not often a big deal, but when you want to hit the emergency record button, or reset the timelapse feature, it will be annoying.
Some dashcams come with the option of using adhesive for mounting, and this would have been helpful. If you’re keen to add speed information to the captured video, there’s a GPS-enabled version of the mount available for about $30.
Practical power: The Vantrue T2 comes with two power options, the first a standard cigarette-lighter adapter with a hardwired mini-USB cable, the second a DC converter cable that lets you power the T2 via your car’s OBDII port, where it can draw power from the car’s battery. The preferred choice is the OBD cable.
A lot of vehicles cut power to their accessory ports when the ignition is turned off. This isn’t a big deal if you’re only interested in recording while driving, but if you intend to monitor your car while it’s parked, a dashcam can only keep watch as long as its internal battery maintains a charge. We left the Mazda 3 parked for a five-day stretch over the holidays, and on day six, we jumped in and the car started without hesitation.
Ideal sentry: The T2 is equipped with a super-capacitor instead of an on-board rechargeable battery, so it can’t operate without a direct power source. It’s an intentional design choice: Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries can fail in very hot or very cold conditions, which happen in car interiors in Canada.
The combination of battery-less super-capacitor design and OBDII port power makes it the ideal sentry for Canadian vehicles.
Sound and vision: The T2’s camera uses a Sony CMOS sensor at a maximum resolution of 1920 X 1080 and speed of 30 frames per second (fps). With a 160-degree field of view, this combination provides a good record of your drive. It’s wide enough to capture everything that is visible between the car’s A-pillars, while not causing the kind of distortion that 170- or 180-degree cameras can introduce.
Conventional wisdom has it that a higher-resolution camera will give you better detail, both in images and video, but other factors can play a much bigger role in overall image quality.
The sensor size, its sensitivity to light, and the level of compression used during recording all contribute to a better or worse result. Despite the T2’s non-2K/4K 1080P resolution, it delivered a far higher quality recording than the 2K dashcam by Zero Edge we had on hand for comparison.
Low-light recording at night was especially impressive, with both driving and parked videos delivering excellent levels of detail, and very low levels of “noise” or fuzziness in the darkest sections of the image. The T2 can also record in HDR mode, a feature only just becoming mainstream on dashcams. High Dynamic Range vastly improves contrast and colour depth, but you’ll need an HDR-capable monitor or TV to appreciate the difference.
Settings and controls: Dashcam controls are traditionally awkward, and the T2 is no exception. The navigation buttons are tiny, and mounted to the underside of the camera’s body, with the enter/ OK button positioned immediately to the left of the screen. The T2, because it has no battery, must stay plugged in, which forces you to either keep the accessory port USB cable on hand for these moments, or use a USB battery pack and mini-USB cable.
The two-inch colour screen is about average in terms of size, but it offers very good brightness and contrast, and enough resolution to review videos and photos.
Once you get used to the user interface, the T2’s menus are well organized, and most settings are self-explanatory.
More surprising was the included printed instructions, which were well written and easy to understand — a rarity for any consumer electronics these days.
The G-sensor can be set to low, medium, high, or off. At medium sensitivity, we found the T2 would interpret the occasional daily driving event, such as uneven pavement or speed bumps, as impacts, and record a locked video to the memory card. If space were unlimited, this wouldn’t be a problem, but at approximately 350 MB per clip, your card could fill up with locked files very quickly.
Setting the sensor to low mostly stopped this from happening, but also meant a test shove of the car — enough to rock the Mazda on its shocks — didn’t trigger a recording. You’ll have to experiment with this setting to get the right combination for your style of driving.
Conclusion: Spending more than $100 on a dashcam may feel like an unnecessary expense, but the Vantrue T2 makes a good argument for doing so.
Its impeccable image quality, combined with its super-capacitor design that gives it virtually unlimited battery life, and a much higher tolerance for extreme temperatures, makes it an excellent driving companion.