Which Dash Cam Should I Buy?

This buyer’s guide explains what type of dash cam is right for your fleet of vehicles. We will explain the differences between a consumer dash cam and a commercial hard wired dashboard camera designed for professional use. Additionally, we’ll define two types of hard wired dash cam and tell you everything you need to know before buying a dash cam for your company vehicle(s).

Why should I buy a hard wired dash cam?

Types of hard wired dash cams

What is the difference between consumer and business dash cams?

Hard wired cameras are the only worthwhile dash cam option for business use.

1. Hard wired dash cams mean you don’t have to rely on your drivers to plug the camera into the USB port (or cigarette lighter) to keep it charged.
2. Drivers cannot turn off a hard wired camera while the vehicle ignition is on.
3. Tamper-proof systems can make it very difficult to remove the SD card. This means there is no risk of the driver removing an SD card and “losing” it after causing a crash.
4. You do not have to reformat the SD card every 6 weeks to clear the memory for new recording. It can be auto-formatted remotely.
5. You get higher quality lenses and a higher resolution, making sure you can always read number plates and other details.
6. Professional grade low-light image sensors give you clearer dash cam picture quality when driving at night or in bad weather.
7. You can see footage remotely within your linked vehicle tracking or telematics account, streamed and stored in the cloud.
8. Your data is encrypted on the SD card.
9. On professional dash cams, you can change the definition of the image from ultra HD to a lower definition. This gives you a choice of higher images for fewer hours, or lower image quality for more hours – whichever best matches what you need.

Retail dash cams for consumer use rarely offer these benefits. Some consumer dash cams offer a few of these features, but in a business environment you are likely to need all of them, plus robust hardware you can count on.

Memory size

Memory capacity is extremely important in a professional vehicle camera.

If you buy a consumer dash-cam, you are likely to be offered an SD card with very limited storage capability. Consumer dash-cams have as little as 32 gigabytes of memory as standard, which may store as little as five hours of footage before they overwrite. Professional dash-cam suppliers are likely to offer you hardware with three to four times the memory. The more memory, the more hours of video you can save before the camera starts over-writing with new footage.

The quality of your SD card is as important as its memory capacity, because it needs to cope with being overwritten again and again with new video footage. A lower quality SD card will give you significantly lower re-writes than a higher grade SD card fit for business use.

Consumer dash cams usually rely on the driver pressing buttons to save important footage before it is overwritten This can be a fiddly operation and it is easy to make mistakes and lose the video forever – in some cases, deliberately.

GPS technology

GPS technology in vehicle cameras can show the precise vehicle location in relation to any video frame. This is very useful information.

You can either buy a dash cam with an integral GPS tracker, or use a more reliable separate GPS tracker as part of a vehicle tracking system. This gives you more reliable and complete information, and it’s easier to access.

Built-in G-force recording vehicle cameras

G-force recording is a classic feature of vehicle tracking and telematics systems. It depends on a sensor called an accelerometer, which detects when a vehicle has stopped very abruptly (or is accelerating rapidly or cornering sharply). Stopping very suddenly could mean the vehicle has had a collision.

When working with a g-force recorder and a dash cam, a vehicle tracking system can send the fleet manager an alert including some video footage when it senses that a crash could have happened.

Some hard wired cameras have g-force recording built in, or link directly with a telematics device. They bookmark film in response to sudden braking or other g-force events, meaning you can see each potential incident or driving infringement without watching through the footage in between.

Remote access cloud-based camera systems

Hard wired dash-cams can connect to vehicle tracking or telematics systems and transmit footage to a cloud server. This means the footage is backed up.

Make sure they use a multi-SIM card connected to more than one mobile phone network. (This is called a machine-to-machine roaming SIM.) The SIM picks whichever is the strongest network available in the vehicle location, to guarantee the most reliable signal at all times. So basically, the vehicle camera is like a collection of mobile phones subscribed to every mobile network provider.

You should be paying for this as a fixed price monthly subscription, to make sure you are not stung with a high data usage bill. With some providers you may hit your viewing cap or full data allowance, and then find you cannot see all the footage that you need to check at a later point.

When choosing a cloud-based vehicle camera system, the service you get will depend on your vehicle tracking system as well as the camera itself.

1. Is all footage stored, or only selected clips relating to g-force collision alerts that may be useful in insurance claims? Collision alerts are never 100% reliable so you may miss out on important footage.
2. How long is the footage stored for? Some systems save your footage for 30 days, but some suppliers offer less.
3. How is the pricing structured? Check the monthly fee for cloud video storage and exactly what you get for this.
4. How much does the multi-SIM monthly subscription cost and which mobile networks does it work on?

Live streaming

Live streaming means real time transmission of video from the dash cam. It sounds cool but it tends to be very pixelated and nothing like the quality you can download afterwards. Live streaming is expensive. Much more affordable systems have just a few minutes delay, or let you download footage of specific incidents or send them to you automatically.

Audio recording hard wired dash cams

Audio recording as an option can add information to recorded video in case of incidents. The main reason some companies use this is to check if their driver uses a mobile phone while on the road. This audio evidence could include audible warnings made by the driver such as sounding the horn, or the reversing sensors beeping.

Some type of hard wired dash cam can record the interior of the driver’s cab, revealing if he is using a phone while driving and also recording what he is saying. Some drivers are unaware that their dash cam is recording them. We did hear of a driver who was sacked after being recorded criticising his boss. There are legal restrictions on using recordings that you make of people when they are not aware you are recording them. If you think you may need to use recording for legal evidence in any situation, it is vital that you tell your drivers you are recording audio.