I've owned two of these for 3 years - one in each car. They loop-record anytime the car is in motion. I installed a GPS-overlay box between my forward-facing camera (mounted on my rear-view mirror) and the DVR. This imprints my speed on the video. The insurance this provides against he-said she-said accidents, inaccurate laser guns (check out my youtube video), or rogue police who say one thing on the side of the road, and another in court - is priceless.
All co-workers have these installed after seeing how it reveals how 'unimpeachable, trustworthy, and honest' police officer testimony is anything but...
I don't go looking for trouble. It finds me. When it does, it's great to have an unbiased witness ready to come to my defense.
Note: If your state is a two-party consent state, you'll need to warn anyone within audio recording distance that they're being recorded. Otherwise, at best it's inadmissible, or at worst, you could be charged with felony wire-tap offenses. I solved this problem by applying small (3" x 1") red warning labels in the corner of all roll-down windows. They look like alarm stickers, but state "Notice: Any conversations inside and within 6' of this vehicle may be recorded".
I would have given it 5 stars, but I have two annoyances:
1) The A/V in/out jacks are nothing more than a 4-contact 3.5mm stereo jack. In humid environments the internal contacts become 'dirty' causing flicker in the video if the cables are bumped.
2) The video is actually split into multiple 1 - 1.5MB asf files. They can be spliced back together, but there is about a 2-4 frame loss at each seam. It's barely noticeable, but it is an annoyance. I imagine this has to be the case as the files must be completed and saved before power loss. If the power is turned off, whatever file is being written is corrupt. Each segment is about 4-6 seconds long. So you lose the last few seconds of record when you turn off the car.
Because of the age of mine, I do not have a firmware update option under the SD section of the menu. I have an email into svat to see if there is a work-around. For now, my max SD size is 4GB (non-SDHC).
If you want to see videos of how this works in a car, look up my username on utube.
(11 customers reviews)Customers Rating=4.0 / 5.0
More Detail For
SVAT CVP800 Mini Portable DVR Digital Video Recorder with MPEG4 Compression- Removable storage (SD card recording. 128 MB SD card included)
- MPEG-4 compression with audio
- Motion detection and scheduled recording options
- Easy to set up and use
- Records at 12, 24 and 30 FPS
