Have you ever had the experience of driving along, witnessing something amazing, and wishing that you had caught it on video? Maybe you’ve had some struggles with your car insurance company following a fender bender with one of the many bad drivers in Vancouver, because you had little in terms of proof that the other guy was wrong? For these and so many other reasons, dashcams are slowly but surely rising in popularity in many parts of the world.
They’re particularly prevalent in places like Russia, but they are starting to become a little more commonplace in Canada and the United States too. The idea is that when you have this camera hooked up on your windshield, the camera will provide continuous video recording of everything that happens in front of your car. I recently received the P3 dashcam from Papago! to review and have been toying with it for the last few days.
Unlike some other dashcams on the market, the Papago! P3 has a full color display (2.4-inch) that provides a live feed of everything that it is recording. While the photo above may lead you to believe that this is a touchscreen, it is not. There are four physical buttons below the indicator LED for navigating through the menus. The “backup” button isn’t for a rear-facing backup camera either; it’s just to save the most recently recorded clip to memory so that it won’t be overwritten. By default, the P3 will record in five-minute clips until the SD card is full, then it will start overwriting the oldest clips.
I’m not going to go into too much detail right now, as the full written review will be published on MEGATechNews after I’ve had more of a chance to put the P3 through its paces, but I will tell you that initial impressions are generally positive.
The video quality is quite good, offering an extra wide 130 degrees of vision, recorded at 1080p full HD resolution. Naturally, visibility is better during the day, but as you can see in the embedded clip below, it’s still pretty darn good at night too. It’ll even record your GPS coordinates, speed and direction of travel, and the time of recording. Make sure you crank the video quality up to 1080p and view full screen to get the best sense of what you can expect.
The Papago! P3 Dashcam sells for about $275 online.
UPDATE: And here is some daytime test footage, again in 1080p full HD.
I thought the video was very good for night time. Looks like it is worth the price.