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Ukraine, Kiev
1 Level
718 Review
61 Karma

Review on VIOFO Interior Infrared Buffered Detection by Mark Saric

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Decent camera, app not very desirable UPDATED, do not buy

UPDATE IN 5 MONTHS: DVR no longer activates WiFi (see photo). I can no longer load frames on the go, making my use completely useless. I paid $140 for it. Looks like a SCAM. I'll give that a slightly lower score, mainly because the Android app is a bit finicky. If you don't care about the app, then this is the 4-star dashcam for you. The video quality seems pretty good, the front shots seem a little blurrier than other dashcams I've used, but it shows more of what's going on, so I think that was the point. I also noticed that the FOV seems to be a lot smaller than I would like if I had a small car. I'm sure it would be fine, but I don't and the front seems to crop a little more than I'd like. The internal IR camera is a bit shaky. So if you set other dash cams to "Automatic", they will automatically turn off IR during the day so you don't turn pink throughout the video. This dash cam appears to be 100% working due to its IR radiation. You can choose either full color with IR or black and white monochrome with IR. And there's Auto for color during the day, or Mono at night. But who really wants their shots to be pink during the day? Because of that, I'm a little disappointed that I paid the price I paid and this core feature is missing. The GPS seems to work pretty well for the most part, sometimes showing zero speed for half a second while going down a road, losing all coordinates, then coming back like it lost connection or something. It's a little concerning, but hopefully it's just a design haphazard and not a sign that the device is going to fail, especially since I plan on hardwiring it. Now the application. When I first tried it I had just updated the firmware and wanted to make sure I had the latest updates as I've heard it's not the best for Android users. I downloaded it, turned on the wifi and to my surprise it worked. Until I installed it. As soon as I installed it and tried it again in my car, it seemed to me that this is the DVR I need. Well, I'm an Uber driver. I did my first run with it, rode it for a full 8 hours and then tried to look at a few shots. The film material is very buffer-friendly. You watch for about 2-3 seconds and get 5-10 seconds of buffer. And that with both WLAN ranges. When I first used the app, it also showed the GPS map under the live video. Suddenly I notice that the area is now completely white and empty. So I contacted their tech support and according to them the gps part is not working live but I need to download the video to my phone to see it. Well I looked at the uploaded video and of course it showed the map information but it worked live when I first set up the dash cam. Overall it has its flaws and tricky moments, but it still seems better than previous DVRs. If you're an Uber driver or just want to record internally and externally with an app that works mostly as intended, this isn't a bad buy. Please note: I've seen many app reviews stating that the app is useless and doesn't work, it seems common on older phones. I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus that I use to drive Uber and the Viofo app. This works for me but may not work for users with older versions of Android. Keep that in mind when you click the buy button. I have a family member who has front and back versions and uses the iPhone app and showed me how. Works 100% without any issues, not even buffering live streams. UPDATE: I've found that when using the right-hold button to turn on Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi selected by default is the slower range. The only way to access the 5GHz band is to manually go into settings and select it. Because of this, using this button on Android results in playback buffering and ridiculously long download waits. This device also has GPS. You might think that the date and time are automatically retrieved from the GPS, but that's not the case. This means that the date and time will not be saved unless you hardwired it. Very inconvenient and annoying for the price.

Pros
  • nice thing
Cons
  • some flaws