Tag Archives: cheap

[Christmas 2015 Gift Ideas] Review: Tendak 2.7″ Car DVR Dashcam – first class footage for under £60!

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Rating: ★★★★½

PROS: 

  • Excellent footage quality at both 1080p and 720p with stunning 720p 60fps
  • Automatic recording and time-stamping makes day to day use seamless
  • Very small and light
  • Includes 16GB memory card out of the box

CONS:

  • No registration plate stamping
  • Built-in battery almost pointless
  • Fiddly controls

RRP £78, best price at time of writing £56.99 on Amazon

There’s been an increasing focus on in-vehicle video recording in recent years, partly thanks to a rise in the amount of fraudulent insurance claims (such as “crash-for-cash” set-ups) and partly due the increasing difficulty of proving innocence in a collision scenario.

In fact, dashcams – as they are so-called – aren’t anything new and have actually been on the market for a number of years though. However, as their quality has improved and prices have fallen, they are all of a sudden becoming an important accessory to have, with some insurance providers even offering discounts if you have one fitted.

I was keen to give the technology a go and got my hands on a Tendak model direct from Amazon. Complete with a 2.7″ on-board display, all power cables and a 16GB memory card, it comes with everything you need to get started.

Without even getting to the actual testing of the product, I was immediately surprised by the size and weight of the dashcam. It is much smaller than I was expecting it to be – and this is no bad thing at all – after all, the less distractions I have in my windscreen, the better. While small, it does have excellent build quality and feels like a product that was built to last. The buttons on the left hand side of the unit are sturdy but a little difficult to press, but this doesn’t really detract from the design of the product given how rarely you’ll use them once the dashcam is set up.

Speaking of which – set up was very easy indeed. I unboxed the product indoors, stuck it on charge for a while and then switched it on. Before you do anything else, it is essential to ensure the date and time is set correctly as you could be relying on that in a legal scenario. Using the on-screen menus with the left hand side buttons was admittedly rather fidly and did take some getting used to – but it just takes a little mastering. I went ahead and set mine in 720p 60fps mode – the device is fully capable of 1080p but I wanted the higher frame rate as I feel this could be important if I ever needed the footage to send to an insurance company. Once you’ve set up your basic settings like motion detection (you’ll want this on if you want the device to work automatically) and power saving mode (turn this on if you don’t want the display on all the time while you’re driving), you’re ready to mount the device in the car. You may also want to turn on or off the on-board microphone – I for one am not hugely fussed about my in-car conversations being recorded and turned this off!

Fitting the device in your vehicle should be fairly easy. The included windscreen mount works perfectly well and securely fits the dashcam its housing. The next step is wiring the device in – and depending on your vehicle you might find this frustrating. I myself have a Mk7 Ford Fiesta which, surprisingly enough, is actually used in the product demonstration photos. In my case, I could run the power cable along the top of the windscreen without it being visible, but would need to remove trim from the side of the car to hide cables completely. The supplied power cable has ample length and you shouldn’t run into any problems there. I was also pleased to see that the included 12v vehicle charging adapter also included a built in USB port for phone charging.

Once it’s fitted, you’re ready to go. The device will boot up automatically as soon as you feed it power, and will record almost instantaneously. It’ll then, depending on how you’ve configured it, will break footage down into segments. I chose 3 minute segments as I felt this would be enough to capture most scenes. It’ll keep recording until the motion stops as long as you’ve got motion detection on (which was unbelievably accurate – almost too accurate!). And that’s about in terms of getting it going.

One word of warning though – make sure your vehicle doesn’t feed power to its 12v socket all the time – for two reasons. First, you risk running your car battery flat if it is constantly feeding power to the dashcam. Second, you’ll overwrite all of your footage with potentially usage stationary footage if you haven’t got motion detection on. Thankfully, most vehicles these days have ignition-timed power sockets, but it’s fairly important that you do check before you buy.

Video footage from the dashcam was, in my view, outstanding. OK – let’s be fair – this is a fairly small camera – but for its size I feel it performed very well. Daylight footage, in particular, was very good with very decent frame rates and suitable definition. The wide angle lens also captured almost the entire viewing area of my windscreen, which was impressive. Night footage wasn’t as good, but still fairly acceptable – especially in well lit areas. It would capture a crash at night without much trouble – but you might have some trouble reading a registration place.

Take a look at the sample footage I took to get an idea of how it performs.

Getting the footage from the camera is easy-as-can-be. Simply remove the microSD card, place it in a card reader or SD card adapter, and then copy and paste the video files you need. G-sensor detected “crash” footage is shown in the EVENT folder, while normal video footage is stored in the VIDEO folder.

The only major niggle to me was the battery. It has a rechargeable battery built in that’ll function for about 30 minutes. I get why it’s there – most likely for backup power, but it seems fairly unnecessary to me. Not exactly a massive blow, just a bit of a disappointment in that area.

Overall, I was genuinely very impressed with this dashcam. It produces excellent footage, fits neatly in your vehicle, and doesn’t cost a fortune. At around £50, this could pay for itself easily in the event of an accident.

Better still, some UK insurers now offer discounts for having a dashcam fitted. Swiftcover offers a straight 10% off for any vehicle that has a working dashcam fitted, while AXA Car Insurance offers up to 10% off for a vehicle with a working dashcam. With this in mind, your dashcam may even pay for itself!

Buy now from Amazon UK

Best Macbook Pro with Retina Display 13″ case – Clear mCover Hard Shell Case

I’ve owned my 13″ Retina Macbook Pro for well over a year now and during that time I’ve tried many cases in an attempt to keep scratches and dirt off it. There’s no doubt that you can go to places like eBay and pick up a case for well under £10, but I’ve found most of them don’t work very well. They either fall apart after no time at all, or actually end up putting scratches on your device that weren’t there before it was fitted!

However, I did come across this case – the CLEAR mCover Hard Shell Case for 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. I’ve had it on my Macbook for around 3 months and I have to say it is without doubt the best case I’ve bought so far.

The case snugly fits on your Macbook and is almost completely see-through – so much so that many don’t even realise my Macbook has a case on it. The case is sturdy and will definitely be strong enough to protect your Macbook from a small drop or from being scratched.

The biggest selling point for the case by far and away, though, is the feet that are fitted to the bottom of it. They allow the back of the Macbook to be raised slightly, which makes it much more comfortable to type longer documents (particularly if you’re used to working on a desktop keyboard). It works seamlessly and is a very neat little design feature.

You can buy the case now from Amazon.

It’s also worth noting that they have Macbook Air 11 inch and 13 inch versions available too, as well as 13″ Macbook Pro (non-retina) solid colour variants.

Review: South West Broadband – VPS Hosting

If you’ve been following my tweets lately, you’ll know that I recently moved GEEK! to a brand new VPS server. I did this for many reasons – but primarily because I felt that I was ready to move on from shared hosting and onto something where I’ll learn a little more about how webservers work. GEEK!’s been running well over three years now – and I’ve been through many web hosting providers during that time. I was beginning to get tired of hoping other people on shared servers wouldn’t jeopardize your uptime stats – there always seemed to be some kind of resource hog!

Nonetheless, I went on the hunt for a cheap-ish yet good quality VPS provider (I might have stayed with my old provider HostParcel as, in fairness, they were pretty good – but sadly they don’t offer VPS services) and was pointed to South West Broadband. They seem to be pretty new in VPS services, but I was interested in their good value and seemingly honest services.

So I signed up to their lowest price package to see what was what. For £8 a month, I was given a VPS with 256MB RAM (although I’m told this will soon become 512MB), 10GB storage, 300GB bandwidth and a Linux flavour of my choice (I was recommended to Debian). Pretty neat, I thought – and very good value nonetheless! They also offer a 12 month prepayment discount – giving you 12 months for the price of 10, if you’re happy to commit.

And to be totally honest, so far I’m really impressed. The customer support is superb – better than I’ve ever seen in a hosting provider. You get access to online support via Skype or a ticketing system – as well as an emergency telephone number which isn’t premium rate (this is something I really like to see).

The server they assigned me seems to work very well. You get full SSH access (which you’d expect) and you are allowed access to all the controls and commands that you’ll ever need. Response times from the server are incredible – from my college in Oxford I can get a response from the server just outside London in just 4ms – pretty darn good!

As for value for money – I’ve never seen such value. I’d always considered VPS services very expensive – but £8 a month is hardly expensive for the system you get.

So really I haven’t got many (if any) complaints. For decent value, high performance VPS servers with decent customer support, I couldn’t think of anywhere else to recommend you!

Oh, by the way – SWB aren’t actually offering their VPS packages on their website yet. However, if you contact them via twitter they seem to be happy to sort you out with a package. They also offer a decent range of shared and reseller packages, so if a VPS isn’t your thing, they’re bound to have something that is.