hawkeye q5 pro dashcam mounted in car

Summary The Hawkeye Q5 Pro does the dashcam thing decently. It is well built and looks handsome. It turns on with the car, starts recording, and stops recording when the drive is over. Video and audio quality are fine overall, with the front video quality having a ton of detail. The camera has a lot of potential for excellence, but some firmware issues hold it back. Namely, the camera was filming at 25FPS and wrote a 30FPS file. As well, some tweaking to noise reduction…Continue Reading “Hawkeye Q5 Pro Dashcam Review – 1440p + 1080p”

The DDPai Z50 is inexpensive and well-built, but the arbitrary 25 FPS limitation and lack of polish on the firmware keep it from being a hit. Some features like the super capacitor are generally only found in more expensive cameras, and even adding the optional 1080p rear camera keeps the price under $140. While this camera at least turns on, records and turns off with the car, other options in this price bracket are more mature software wise.

The Chortau B-T19 is an ultrabudget dashcam from an e-commerce brand Chortau. This camera is a great example of the old adage “too good to be true” in that the 1080p video quality and overall reliability are quite poor. Despite this, the camera frequently receives a “Recommended by Amazon” tag in search results or even Amazon Best Seller status due to its staggering number of reviews.

This camera’s build quality is fantastic. It is a solid piece of kit. However the reliability issues make it highly problematic for me. Am I missing something here? I tried all my basic troubleshooting but still could not get it to work as intended. Mostly everything else about this camera was rock solid. But what is a dashcam if it is not reliable? Not something I would recommend buying that’s for sure.