Tachograph Model:I1000 by car camera

I was looking for a sub $100 lens dash cam for an upcoming road trip. It came down to this one or the "football" shaped cams. I went with this one due the reviews on various sites.Out of the box:Ok, so the damn thing starts up and is entirely in Chinese. It took me about 3 minutes of just going through every menu to get it back to English. Eventually I stumbled across the language menu and saw "Enlish" among various other Chinese characters. Here's the button sequence to save you some time:-Turn the unit on.-Press the left button on the top 3 times-Press the MIC/down arrow button 7 times-Press the right button on top 1 time-You are now in the Language menu - use the down arrow until you have English highlighted-Press the right button on the top 1 time to select English-Press the Power button on the left side twice to exit the menu system.One you have your language selected you can scroll through the menus to changed additional settings - almost all of it is pretty intuitive.So, after the initial setup I did a quick road test. My truck has various 12v outlets - some powered all the time and some only with the ignition. I used the ignition powered outlet and chose the setting in the cam that starts recording as soon as it is powered on. The camera has a small batter that can keep it powered and recording for 1 to 5 minutes after the power source is off. I stuck the main body on the top of my windshield, just to the right of my review mirror and the 2nd camera was permanently mounted to the back window on my truck.Initial impressions:-The video quality is surprisingly good, especially for the price. If you keep your windshield clean, you could just barely make out license plate numbers within about 20' of the front of your car.-I did notice a pretty bad reflection being picked up on the windshield at times when the sun was at a certain angle. I attribute this to the fact that the cam's mount keeps it about 1.5" from the windshield. Occasionally I could see a reflection of the top of my nav screen that's on my dash. I'm going to try to adjust the mount or even come up with something a little different that will allow me to mount the camera lens as close to the glass as possible. That should eliminate any reflections.-Upon review of the files on the SD card I found that it creates two folders - one for each camera. One will be called "DCIMA" and the other "DCIMB". The camera stores the video in 1 minute "mov" (quicktime) video clips. You can load them all in order in your video player's playlist to watch a continuous portion of your trip.I have to do some more testing at night. It seems like the external camera has IR LED lights on it so it can be used as a "driver" recorder to record the inside of your vehicle. I prefer to use it to record what's happening behind me so at night it looked like the LED were creating glare or reflection off the back glass. I need to dig through the menus a little more to see if there's an option to shut the night vision off. Worst case, I intend to just crack the lens case open and clip the power to the lights.Overall I would definitely recommend this as a starter dash cam. It may not get you a license plate number unless conditions are perfect, but it will at least back up your story and show the other details about a car that hit you. If I find it to be very useful I may consider upgrading to one of the $250-300 range units, but for now and as little as I drive I think this will serve it's purpose.

The media could not be loaded. Cant say much because this is the first day with the device.Came set to english (yay)Was brand newRear camera works (double yay)Chime on and off is a bit annoying but wtfe, no big deal (audio off guess is for recording, not the chime).Unit is very light, small but good looking.Cables seem decent size, should fit just fine for my car.So first impression I'm very happy.If i dont update my review consider it positive. If I come back later with complaints the review will be changed.** Update:Still happy with this device, going to leave it as 5 starts for now.Had some issues tho, the item liked to cycle off and on for no reason. Did a reset a few times and finally got it to stay on. IT doesnt turn off tho, you turn it off without power and it comes right back on so its likely dead right now. Just realized that power off on the remote actually leaves it off, for now.Night video for rear camera is pretty bad, cant see license plates (my main goal).Front camera is pretty good all around.I've made a video and hope to upload it for the review.All in all I think its a finicky camera but its doing its job and for the price is hard to beat.UPDATE: I decided to goto 1 star, this item is garbage, stopped working after a month.

The screen on the main unit had some scratches on it. Not sure if it's bad packaging or they sent me a used unit.Otherwise the dash cam works as expected. User interface came in the English settings, but I changed it to Chinese since I read Chinese. The manual came in both English and Chinese. the English manual is junk; the Chinese is not great but certainly more readable.Comes with both a suction cup mount and a tape mount for the main unit which was nice. Rear cam uses tape. The rear cam cable is pretty long, more than enough for a compact car. Not sure if long enough for a mini-van or larger SUVs.Video quality is okay. The front cam is better than the rear, but still not really useful for reading off license plates. But for the price it's not bad. Records in .mov format. One minute of front cam video is roughly 33MB, and rear cam is approximately half of that. So in total one minute of recording is about 50 MB.Update:Camera keeps turning itself on and off, probably because it overheats in the sunlight. .