A dog did its business on my driveway and I didn’t catch them because a spider set up shop on my lens. Spider is now gone. Also be sure and prune your trees, even though you can set the camera to ignore certain spaces, it can be tedious going through footage if a wind storm has your evergreens blowing around.

Seven months of use and no regrets. Might set up another one so I can put a camera closer to the mailbox. Only way to improve this little unit is to be able to hook up multiple cameras. I am very satisfied.
Rating: 4 / 5

I could never get the motion detector to work correctly even after emails and phone calls to

SVAT. Dan P eventually told me he did not have an answer to the problem of why the motion detect

would continuously record even though it was in a “manual” and “motion detect” mode at 50% sensitivity.

His idea was to use a different camera (which I did with the same results). However, both cameras

are made with high end Sony chipsets and lenses.

Well, I asked for and got an RMA. Then I read the details provide in the RMA instructions. SVAT has several

places where they remind you that if you miss anything or thepackage is not in conformance, they will hold

your unit until you pay at least $50 plus return shipping. They also write that if in their sole discretion

they determine it is not a product defect, the $50/hour charge applies. I purchased this unit from Amazon for 149.99

and simply cannot take the risk of a charge that is from 30% or more of what I originally paid.

To have such a warranty with so unfavorable terms to the consumer is not, in my opinion, a valid warranty.

These details were never disclosed at the original purchase nor in the User’s Guide warranty page. Buyer beware.
Rating: 2 / 5

All co-workers have these installed after seeing how it reveals how ‘unimpeachable, trustworthy, and honest’ police officer testimony is anything but…

I don’t go looking for trouble. It finds me. When it does, it’s great to have an unbiased witness ready to come to my defense.

Note: If your state is a two-party consent state, you’ll need to warn anyone within audio recording distance that they’re being recorded. Otherwise, at best it’s inadmissible, or at worst, you could be charged with felony wire-tap offenses. I solved this problem by applying small (3″ x 1″) red warning labels in the corner of all roll-down windows. They look like alarm stickers, but state “Notice: Any conversations inside and within 6′ of this vehicle may be recorded”.

I would have given it 5 stars, but I have two annoyances:

1) The A/V in/out jacks are nothing more than a 4-contact 3.5mm stereo jack. In humid environments the internal contacts become ‘dirty’ causing flicker in the video if the cables are bumped.

2) The video is actually split into multiple 1 – 1.5MB asf files. They can be spliced back together, but there is about a 2-4 frame loss at each seam. It’s barely noticeable, but it is an annoyance. I imagine this has to be the case as the files must be completed and saved before power loss. If the power is turned off, whatever file is being written is corrupt. Each segment is about 4-6 seconds long. So you lose the last few seconds of record when you turn off the car.

Because of the age of mine, I do not have a firmware update option under the SD section of the menu. I have an email into svat to see if there is a work-around. For now, my max SD size is 4GB (non-SDHC).

If you want to see videos of how this works in a car, look up my username on utube.
Rating: 4 / 5