A silent witness on the road
We’re surrounded by CCTV as we drive. Buildings, traffic lights and even speed cameras keep an eye on us. There is a growing trend though, for drivers to install cameras in their cars. Car-owners are seeing the benefits of adding a small dashcam that records every journey in case there’s an incident that could end up with liability been disputed.
Tech company Mio make a range of dashcams, for all budgets. The MiVue 766 is one of their higherend devices as it has built in GPS and WiFi for connecting to your smartphone. In the box is a suction mount and a charging cable that connects to the car cigar-lighter.
The MiVue itself is a trim, well designed device. It only weighs 100g and at its widest is just under 9cm across. That means it’s easy to mount and incredibly discreet, in fact you can neatly position it so it doesn’t catch your eye while driving. I ran the charging cable around the windscreen, holding it in place with a couple of pieces of Bluetack and the whole set-up was out of view. Once installed and powered up, the device is easy to set-up. There is a slot for a microSD card, which isn’t included in the price. This is where the recordings of your drives are stored. It has capacity for up to a 128GB card, so there’s plenty of room for storage. I was surprised to find the display on the back of the camera is a large 2.7in touch-screen. Once powered up I set the date to make sure recordings are stamped with the correct time.
However, if the GPS time setting is enabled, the camera uses the time for your location automatically.
There are two recording modes, continuous and event recording. The event mode is triggered by unusual actions. For instance, if you accelerated sharply or braked suddenly the camera will start recording the event. However, the continuous recording seems more useful allowing you to record all your drives and just overwrite the old ones if life remains incident free. Of course there’s also an accompanying iOS and Android app, and while it’s not necessary for operation, it is useful and introduces a little fun. You can connect your phone and you share the recorded footage to YouTube or even Facebook Live. As well as the 1080p HD video, the MiVue can take still images. The single feature I didn’t like, is the that the cigarette lighter socket gets used up. Ideally the camera’s plug-in charger should have a passthrough so drivers can charge other devices. However, you can add a multi-socket USB to your car to deal with that. The MiVue 766 packs a lot of tech for the money. The video quality is excellent and the ability to review footage with a map overlayed is a tremendous progression in this sort of tech. Sturdy, well-built and full of features, this is a useful device that adds reassurance to every trip on the road.