Here is half my review on the cams, G1W-C & A118-C. My wife drove the Genesis a few hours more Northeast than i did from Nashville Friday. She is still there on the acct of having to go to the ER and still is there so I haven't gotten the G1W-C yet. As soon as I do I will review the footage and post my thoughts on that.
This part of the review will be of the A118-C in my Ram.
The A118-C surprised me a great deal. I wired it directly into my rear sliding window switch after trimming some wires and stuck it near the bottom left of the rear view mirror on the wind screen. I have a tint strip about 8" down so i didn't stick it on my tint so it sits about 2" below the edge of the mirror from the lens.
The fitment was good on the windscreen. With the sticky pad on it fit nicely just below my tint strip. I did put a piece of red label scotch clear gorilla glue like tape on top of the OEM sticky pad just in case it would want to fall in the heat so I cannot say if the OEM was good enough or not. Other reason I did it was because the scotch tape is about 1/16" thick so in the case of removing the cam from the mount it has a little bit of stretchyness and will not eventually start to peal off. Popping the cam off the mount seemed effortless as well. Just a little push up and it comes right up but stays on the mount very snugly. I like how this one lets me adjust the level of the lens and not have to adjust the camera as opposed to the G1W-C. Just get it straight on the windscreen and you can move the lens where ever you want.
The A118-C recorded flawlessly. Initially set on 720-60fps, on a 5 min loop it recorded every second of the 2.5 hour drive. The 5 min clip took up 270mb per segment and no time in between each segment was wasted off the clock. This surprised me. It ended at for example at second 54, and started the next segment at second 53. It actually stopped and started each segment one second before the other previous one ended. No five seconds in between while it was filing away a file. This was a nice surprise.
The next part is about image quality of the video. First I used the 720-60fps. Most everything was fine. It was clear sunny sky's both days and I could pick up everything. Except license plates. No matter how close I got to the car in front it wasn't going to pick up clear
letters/numbers. Just shapes. So turned it up to the 1080 for the Monday commute to work and it was like going from SD to HD. Obviously. In 1080 it picked up license plates, all road signs, everything. This is the way to go. I do have a kingston 32gb Class 4 card in each one for reference by the way. The 720 mode recorded a segment at 270mb. While in 1080 each 5 min segment turned into 571mb. More than double but well worth it. On Sat and Sunday I did have the exposure set to factory settings. For Monday I did go down to a -1/3 to darken it up some. It did darken and I think to much for the purpose. We did have some low dark clouds but it wasn't that dark at all. I will switch this back to an even exposure.
Sound. The sound works good. Maybe too good. For 2 hours Saturday morning i had my radio down so far I could barely hear it. It came thru to the cam like i had the stereo plugged into it. It picked up cars driving by on the interstate with all my windows up, and some of my factory exhaust if I took it off cruise and had to step down on it some. It will pick up the turn signal blinker sound which may be useful if you were in front of a Judge however.
The time stamp, date and time were good, accurate and didn't change anytime. I did unplug several times just to check and it stayed accurate. The file name even records the time it stopped and in a way the time it started. You just have to dissect the file name a little to see it.
The menu's and firmware was the same on each cam with the exception of a version number difference. There are firmware updates but I did not go that route at this time. The menu's were the same and seemed easy to navigate. Once you learn what button does what, it is very simple. The limited instructions that came with each one is just enough to figure it out. There are some more detailed and to the point instructions on the net written by other users.
I did not use the picture taking mode nor did I hook it up with the HDMI.
I am in the process of uploading a 720 and 1080 video on youtube. Once it uploads and I assume scale down the graphics I will post the link. Here are a few stills of each.
When I get the G1W-C back I will do the same.
