 Buying a car is a major decision and you'll wanna do everything you can to protect your investment. Oh, oh, oh, what the? That guy just hit me. Good thing I caught his license plate on one of my many trusty dash cams. This one's kinda crap. This one too. Well, surely my expensive one will. No, come on! It's unusable. What the heck is going on here? I spent over a thousand US dollars on a dozen of the top rated dash cams on Amazon and almost every single one sucks to the point of being basically unusable. How did this happen? I did my homework. I got the most recommended. I got the highest rated units. I thought I picked up something reliable. Why aren't these things decent? Like our sponsor. Build Redux. Build Redux makes it easy to configure your new build with support guns to help along the way. They also offer competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself. So head to buildredux.com slash Linus and start your new build today. This video started over three years ago when my wife came across some hilarious examples of blatant insurance fraud that was prevented by dash cam footage. She asked me to get some dash cams for our cars. No problem, said I. And I headed over to Amazon where, to my surprise, nearly everything was obscenely priced, full of misleading specs, covered in obviously paid reviews, or sometimes all three. Long story short, I settled on a cheap and cheerful unit with decent reviews and bought two of them, not one of which even managed to power on. So I gave up. Then one of our new writers overheard me recounting this story and went, I can look into that. I need a dash cam too. And two weeks later, we've learned a lot. To start with, the dash cam market is still not as straightforward as one might hope. Marketing materials for cheaper dash cams can be confusing and contradictory, and their performance is basically impossible to compare without trying them side by side in the real world. Dash cams take all the issues of reviewing a regular camera and they add on a ton of extra usability features that need to be evaluated. Parking mode, discreteness, loop recording, gravity sensors, even the length of the cable matters. Too long and you've got an unsightly coil of wire to hide, too short and it could be a challenge to reach your power source. It's a lot to take in. The good news is that if all you want is proof of fault or lack thereof in the event of an accident, it's still pretty hard to go wrong. Our value pick is the Thinkware F70. It's pretty bare bones in terms of features, lacking creature comforts like GPS data, or even a screen for that matter, but it is dead simple to set up since it doesn't need to be paired to an app. The included 3M mounting tape is quite permanent and while it won't be winning any awards for image quality, we were able to clearly identify the vehicles and people in our footage and we could even make out license plates, at least on stationary cars. That's pretty okay, especially for just 70 US dollars. But there were situations where it left us wanting a bit more. Now our target price was under a hundred dollars and we ended up with a wide range of features and image quality. So let's make our way through the rest of them from cheapest to most expensive. This is the A20 from Bayoune, a brand with no website, but they do have the lucky number eight spot in the Amazon best sellers list. You might not expect much for $60. And if that's the case, boy, are you ever a savvy shopper. Image quality during the late hours of the day is lacking and at night is so bad that you'd think you were filming on a potato. Making matters worse, the screen doesn't automatically dim so you'll be constantly, vibrantly reminded of how little useful information your camera is capturing. The BT13 comes in at $10 more, ranks number six on Amazon. And just like the Bayoune, it comes courtesy of a mystery meat brand with no website, this time called Choartow. It's not that hard to have a website guys. I've got one. It's full of great deals, like these $9 mystery cable ties, lttstore.com. Daylight quality is grainier than the A20 for sure, but text is actually slightly easier to read, indicating that Choartow might be using a better sensor, but what they aren't doing is much in the way of post-processing to enhance the image quality. And this is especially apparent at night where the A20 actually looks somewhat decent in comparison. Also, like the Bayoune, the screen stays on by default. Annoying. But one interesting feature it has at least is that the rear camera input is mini HDMI. So if you wanted to use a decent camera for your rear view, the Choartow could act as your screen and save your backups. Otherwise we stand by our recommendation of the Thinkware F70 at this price. And at $80 for that matter, these two chunky boys didn't make it into our side-by-side tests due to their considerable bulk. Both have cabin facing cameras though, so realistically they're designed more for an Uber driver audience anyway. The T1 comes from E-Way, the first manufacturer with an actual website. And in broad daylight, driving away from the sun, like ideal conditions, it can't seem to make out the words on many road signs, let alone other important details. Not a good showing for the second highest rated unit with a cabin camera. Chunker number two is the D30H from Previo. They claim it's a 4K camera, which if true could be a really great value. But out of the box, the metadata for the files clearly reads 1080p. With that aside, in the daylight, it can read signs, which is an improvement over the Bayouon and the E-Way, but license plates are still elusive unless at a complete stop and positioned just right. One cool feature though, is that it uses capacitors instead of lithium batteries, unlike the rest of the cameras we've talked about already. This is a nice to have because lithium batteries, especially when subjected to heat and when they're constantly fully charged, wear out more quickly, which can lead to battery swelling and in extreme cases, fire. Let's step up our budget. Surely for $100, this sponsored listing for the Rexxing V1 4K will be a good choice, right? I mean, it has 4K right in the name, right? And Forbes named it the best dash cam for a tighter budget of 2022. Let's see how that's going. Actually, not too bad, Forbes. Looking at the videos from around dusk, it is slightly clearer than our $70 F70, but only slightly. Feel of view, colors, ability to make out text, all of that is pretty much the same, which means that unless you really need the screen, it doesn't feel worth spending 43% more. Maybe Garmin can change my mind. They used to be very well known for their GPS offerings. Their compact dash cam mini two was a little out of our price range at $110, but hey, what's 10 extra bucks for the much better brand name one, right? Well, not right, but at least not wrong. It performs about as well as the V1 4K, maybe a bit better or worse depending on the circumstances. And it has some nice features available, but those features require an app and that app requires an account and that account requires you to give Garmin your information, which is super. Now surely the number one pick on Amazon is gonna ride in and save the day, right? At $120, it is now firmly beyond our original price target, but what's another 10 bucks if it's a lot better, right? Here we go. Really? At dusk, the ROV R2 4K manages to capture less detail than our budget F70, and at night, it's more of the same. Signs are readable sometimes if you're lucky, but there is one last hope. It's the darling of budget dash cam stands across the internet, and it happens to nail our $100 budget exactly. It boasts true 1440p recording with easy and secure mounting and comes from a manufacturer that accepts community feedback and maintains their products through firmware updates. It's even popular enough to get into the top 20 on Amazon, and it's the Viofo A19v3. All of which sounds great, but what about the image quality? Pfft. I mean, in fairness, it is the best we've seen so far, especially when it comes to the finer details, and it's $20 cheaper than some of the competition, but I can't help but be a little disappointed. It just feels like no matter which brand we buy and no matter how much we spend, we're ending up with pretty much the same crappy image, even from our best camera. So let's do something I wouldn't actually recommend and completely blow our budget. These are the BlackVue DR750X Plus and the Thinkware U1000. The DR750X is BlackVue's second most expensive one channel dash cam at $270 US. It has dual band WiFi, a back illuminated image sensor with enhanced night vision and support for LTE cloud storage backup. And the Thinkware U1000, well, that's Thinkware's flagship device, the best of the best. 150 degree viewing angle, 1440p, 60 FPS recording, geo-fencing with push notifications, red light camera detection and picture quality that, oh, come on! The BlackVue is as bad as the crappy Chinese cameras and the U1000 is barely better than the A19v3, if at all. It does have some creature comforts. I mean, I guess it's nice that it tells me when there's a red light camera coming up ahead. Red light camera in 200 meters. So that I can stop at it instead of just blowing through like I normally would. I mean, this thing's gonna pay for itself and save traffic tickets. And the geo-fencing feature, okay, that legitimately could come in handy once my kids are old enough to drive. And maybe BlackVue's cloud storage would come in handy in case the camera got destroyed in a crash. But at more than double up to quadruple the prices of these other options, I am frankly blown away that there's anything but a colossal improvement in the quality of capturing video out the front of my windshield. You know, the entire purpose of these devices. What is going on here? I mean, if I were to put a $400 GoPro in my car instead of one of these cameras, it would look amazing. How are these all so bad? Well, here's a hint. You might see nine dash cams attached to this car. You know what I see? Two dash cams in nine different plastic shelves. Listen to these startup chimes. Video mode. Please insert micro SD card. Look at these default folder structures. Heck, even just look at the rear cameras that come with some of these. Notice any similarities? The thing is, there are hundreds, if not thousands of dash cam brands, but there are only a handful of companies that actually manufacture the two most important components, the SOC and the CMOS image sensor. In SOCs, the major player is Taiwanese Fabless Semiconductor manufacturer Novatec, not to be confused with the Russian Natural Gas Corporation of the same name. Their bread and butter is LCD controllers for companies like Asus or Sony. But on the side, they also make camera SOCs like the NT96-660 and the NT96-655. With the numbering scheme not easily obtainable by the general public, it's hard to tell exactly what the specs of these chips are or when they were designed. But from what we could glean online, the NT96-660 was built sometime around or before 2017, and the last two digits appear to be the series and iteration. So of our 10 dash cams in that near $100 range, eight of them were using Novatec SOCs, and Viopho was one of the few examples we could find of any camera using an SOC where the second to last digit was higher than six, meaning most of them are using five-year-old technology at best. Identifying a Novatec system is fairly easy. They often have the same startup sounds. Video mode. Or use the default backup cameras or even have folder structures that include the name Novatec. Other manufacturers of SOCs include High Silicon from Huawei, Thinkware's manufacturer of choice, Ambarella, and the very infrequently used Allwinner. In our limited searches, we could not seem to find the SOC manufacturers for Blackview or for Garmin products, though it's fairly likely that they're using one of these three. As for CMOS image sensors, nearly every company uses Sony Starvis, a subcategory of their Exmor sensors. Exmors are used in nearly everything, from phone cameras in Apple and Samsung phones alike to high-end consumer cameras to the lowest-end webcams. And the Starvis line is the type that is specifically designed for security cameras and other similar applications that require decent low-light performance. The most common sensor to find in dash cams right now is the IMX335. It's a perfectly fine sensor, actually, capable of 1440p video with a reasonable enough level of clarity, even in low light. The Rove and the Viofo both use this sensor. So then you would think they would have the same image quality, right? Clearly there's a difference, though. What it could be is something to do with Rove using its limited processing power to upscale the image to 4K. Or it could have to do with the Rode using an NT9660 processor, while the Viofo uses an evidently newer NT96670. For the several hundred dollars more that you would pay for the Thinkware U1000, you're getting a Starvis IMX334, which appears to be the next level up from the 335, totally intuitive. But the difference, as far as we've been able to see, isn't that great. If I could put it in PC gamer terms, it's kind of like upgrading your graphics card from a 3070 to a 3070Ti, but for double or triple the price. There are a few other sensor manufacturers, like Omnivision or Galaxy Core, but these are only used occasionally, and image quality, at least going by the other reviews, doesn't seem to be a huge improvement there either. One great thing about Sony being the big kahuna in image sensors is that they're pretty open with their data sheets. So if you know what image sensor a camera uses, you can at least find some basic information on it. But that's only gonna take you so far without having information on the SoC, or probably more importantly, the software algorithms that will be running to process the raw image. The biggest takeaway here then, is that no matter which dash cam you choose, there is kind of this hard limit on image quality that can be achieved at the moment. And some of the low end models, they're already pretty close to that limit. So you're either gonna be settling for good enough, or as we suggested before, you could throw a GoPro up on your windshield with all the associated inconvenience that comes with that. Did I remember to roll it? And the problem is I doubt that this is gonna change anytime soon, because the top dash cam companies seem to be more interested in adding features, like the ability to string five cameras together, or let you review your footage with full gyroscopic readouts, rather than actually making a camera that can read a bloody license plate 10 feet in front of you. So if you're in the market for a dash cam, ignore the Amazon reviews. F70 for the budget shoppers out there, and Viofo A19v3 for pretty much everyone else. Their video quality isn't nearly as far off the top of the line as you would think, and neither of them is gonna put you at major risk of having your window smashed to steal your dash cam. If you wanna add a rear cam as well, the A129 Plus or similar offerings from Viofo will allow you to do that as well, also without breaking the bank. Now let's break our bank, where our sponsor puts money. FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that helps you do your business. 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No, it's an ice scraper. I think I'll be all right. What the heck is going on here? Stop! Forward as one might hope. Fuck you. What the fuck? Cause it's shit, and everything is shit. The included 3M mount, keep doing it, definition of insanity, right? Here we go, boys.