Garmin’s Dashcam range are industry leading. These tiny windshield mounted watchers are taking care to protect you or anyone driving your car. Though if you’re like my partner, it’s a great device to re-watch some extraordinary encounters natural or man-made... Garmin has designed each of their Dashcams for a different purpose, and I'll try to highlight the differentiating factors below.
If you’re in a rush, at the bottom of this article I’ve included a spec sheet that details the differences between the units and a quick summary. As usual though, I’ve done a full breakdown on each unit along with footage comparison from each of the models. Just as a bit of information on the video; The Dashcams weren't installed correctly. I couldn't actually attach these to my windscreen as the sticky magnet they come with is no joke! Think Go-Via tag but worse. These adhesive mounts are built to last, so I ended up with a bit of a hokey setup with magnets and tape. It worked, mostly. The Dashcam 55 got the worst of it so it looks a lot shakier than it should.
COMPATIBLE SOFTWARE
Now if you have ever owned a dash cam you’ll know the pain of removing the MicroSD card putting it in your computer, leaving it in your computer, cursing yourself in the car and then going back and retrieving the MicroSD card. Garmin has done away with this problem with their free VIRB App. You can also use their free software for your PC for any video editing. The dashcam will still run on a MicroSD card, but you’re able to connect a smartphone via WiFi (The cameras own WiFi – you don’t need to connect to your home network) and review any saved photos or videos. You can also download the footage directly to your phone. Just be aware that it’s much faster to do this process via a cord connection. However, this is a very convenient addition by Garmin.
AUTOMATIC FEATURES
All the Dashcams automatically record and save footage when it detects an incident, or you manually tell it to save. The Dashcam’s run on a loop of available space deleting old footage for new footage - if the old footage hasn’t been saved. All the saved clips are time stamped, show location data (latitude, longitude), speed and direction of travel.
The Dashcams also possess incident detection so that when the camera detects an event, the footage is automatically saved. The detection system is an accelerometer sensor or G-sensor installed in the dash cam that will detect movement above a threshold and record and save footage both before and after the 'incident'. The Dash cam will also alert you with
Garmin Dash cam will also alert you with forward collision warnings and lane departure warnings. These aren’t a huge selling point for me, I get much more use out of the fixed red light, and speed camera alerts that the Dashcam announces. There is also an alert that I haven’t come across before which is the “Go” signal, this alert lets you when the traffic has started moving when you are stopped at an intersection or traffic lights. If everyone had this, it would likely make a startlingly difference to my daily commute.
The Dashcams can also shoot footage in a Travelapse format. It will fire every 30 seconds – this is a great little feature to share a cool road trip or adventure.
All the Garmin Dashcams are tiny. The 45 comes with a 2inch LCD display and a physical dimension of 5.62cm x 4.05cm x 3.53 cm and weighs only 59.6g. This size is shared across all the units. It has 4 buttons on the side for easy navigating through the menus and a 30-minute battery life *You should have this unit plugged in.
Another great feature that Garmin doesn't specifically talk about is that the Dashcam will stop displaying after 1 minute, which surprisingly is not a standard feature for dash cams (You can also disable the timeout if necessary). This is perfect for night driving so that you don't have a glowing orb in front of your face ruining your night vision.
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