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I really like having a dash cam. To be completely honest, it kinda feels like a need more than a want when you live in Memphis and regularly drive the 240 loop. It seems like people without insurance or a driver’s license are the overwhelming majority of the cars on the road.
I have the Ring Car Camera in the family car, and I like it, despite its overall weirdness. You can check out my review of that here. It’s meant to be a more permanent installation though, sticking to the glass with a 3M adhesive tape. I’m a car dealer, and I switch cars a lot, so I wanted something that would be easy to move from car to car. The Viofo dash cams are also great, but they have the same problem as the Ring Car Camera, the install is fairly permanent.
I found the Rove R2-4K Pro kinda by accident, it was on an Amazon flash sale for less than $90 and it had good reviews. It seemed to tick all the boxes for what I wanted, so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a reasonably small dash camera with wifi to easily transfer videos to your phone, capacitor instead of battery to actually survive the Memphis heat, 4K video at 30fps, and by default it comes with a suction cup mount instead of an adhesive mount. Actually, it comes with BOTH a suction cup mount and an adhesive mount, but you get the idea.
To go with it, I picked up a Samsung Pro Endurance MicroSD card. Dash cameras usually loop record, meaning they fill up the SD card, and then start overwriting the oldest videos. Couple that with the fact that they might record for hours every day, and you can probably figure out why it’s a good idea to get an MicroSD card that’s made for endurance. 256gb seemed like a good middle ground between overwriting too soon and spending a bunch of money on a huge storage card for videos that will almost all go unwatched ever. With 256gb, at 4k resolution, my 3 minute files are around 750mb. If my math is correct, I should be able to fit about 50 hours of video on a 256gb card before it starts to overwrite the oldest files. I drive between one and two hours a day, so I should be good for about a month if I need to go back and find some footage, assuming I’m not like on a road trip or something. Seems good enough for me.
The R2-4K Pro comes with a bunch of stuff in the box. You get a spudger tool to hide the wire, a suction cup mount, an adhesive mount, a short charging cable, a long charging cable, and a 12v car charger with two USB A ports. In my case, I’m going to just use the suction cup mount and the short cable so I can easily move it from one car to the next when I switch vehicles.
If you’re a normal person that will keep your car for years, I would suggest you forgo the power options that come in the box and just pick up a hardwire kit. That will let you wire the car up to your fuse box so it automatically comes on when you start the car, and automatically goes into parking mode when you turn the engine off.
I’m pretty impressed with the video quality of this camera. Dynamic range is pretty good, at least for a dash cam, and the video is clear and sharp.
At night, picture quality is good as well. Noise obviously goes up, but the point of this camera is to capture events, not give you super clean footage for a cinematic video, so the choice to crank the ISO and get more detail at the cost of more noise makes total sense.
Check out the YouTube video above to see a lot of footage, but these screenshots should give you a pretty good idea of what you should expect.
Another cool feature of the R2-4K Pro is the screensaver. You have three options. You can leave it on the live video, you can have it put up a screensaver after a set number of minutes, or you can just have it turn off. If you opt for the screensaver, it displays date, time, speed, and direction of travel. Pretty nice to have! The camera also overlays location and speed onto the video, which is a plus to me. I had a school crossing guard that kept yelling at me to slow down when I was doing 11-12mph in a 15mph zone. It’s nice to be able to PROVE you were not speeding.
All these things combined make this an excellent dash camera overall. I’ve only had it for a week or so, but it seems to be super reliable. It automatically starts recording when I start the engine, and every time I’ve wanted to check for a video, it’s been there as expected. Considering you can regularly pick one up on Amazon for under $100, that’s a lot of bang for your buck. If you’re a non-weirdo who intends to keep their car for a while, I would definitely go for the hardwire kit I mentioned above, that will keep the wire from being in your view and free up your power outlet for other things, but even with the hardwire kit and MicroSD Card, you can probably get away under $150 for a very good dash cam. That’s cheap insurance, especially if you live in Memphis.
