Thanks for tuning in today we're going to be reviewing the Magicshine Seemee DV bike camera
tail light. [Music] While a photo may be worth a thousand words having video footage of a crash or
near hit can be priceless. Magicshine's new Seemee DV is their first combination tail light and Camera
which acts like a rear-facing dash cam for your bicycle as with other Magicshine products the Seemee
DV undercuts the price in a popular Garmin and cyclic camera tail lights while adding
new features. Packing wise you can see very simple you have a black cardboard box orange branding on
here with Seemee DV printed on here and the Magicshine logo on the back side. We have basic
specs for the taillight as well as a two year warranty which is nice to see. We'll go and take
it out of the box and go over the specs. Retail price on this is only $119.99 so very affordable.
It has a 1080p HD camera with 146 wide lens so you have a nice field of view to see everything
behind you. It has a Micro SD card and it supports up to 128 gigabyte card in here for extra footage.
It also has incident detection so has a built-in accelerometer so if you get into an accident
or you crash it'll record up to 60 seconds and lock that footage so it doesn't get overwritten.
You have a 3400 milliamp battery on the inside that gives you a run time up to 110 hours in the
eco mode. You also have a 30 LED tail light with these three COB LEDs which give you nice 360
degree visibility. In terms of what comes with this obviously get the taillight camera combo and a
nice foam cut out to keep everything safe during shipping.
Then this little compartment underneath you have the instruction manual
the seat post mount with this nice rubber backing on there with an angle to it so it sits straight.
You have a eight gigabyte micro SD card included so you can just use this right out of the box
and then USB type-c charging cable to charge the taillight. Now let's take
a look at the weight of the Seemee DV so just the taillight with the camera that's 102 grams.
Then the mount with its included rubber strap that comes in at 13. foreign despite being
part of Magicshine's Seemee lineup the Seemee DV has an all-new design and visually looks quite different
from the other tail lights on the market. Those tail lights have rectangular or square profiles
while this one has a triangular one so you can see you have a streamlined shape that conceals
a 3400 milliamp battery on the inside as well as the 1080p camera. Then there are three LED strips
so pretty nice package you can see you have a metal body on top which has a molded camera
lens directly inside it now what appears to be a plastic bottom piece that hides all the LEDs.
On the back you have a miniaturized Garmin mount so it's a quarter turn style so you just rotate
it on line up the tabs and then it'll lock into place. Its really nice and secure they include the
seat post mount and it has this triple cut out so it can handle flat rounded D or even aero seat
posts with the different little cutouts and simple rubber strap. You can see it's fairly robust
so it should handle a lot of years of use and has a miniaturized Garmin mount on the inside
on the top you have the two button interface. It almost looks like three when you first look at it
but the top one is just a color indicator so if I press the left button which is the power button
that highlights the color and that's a feature we see with all the Seemee lights. So it actually
indicates the battery status. It's a three level indicator so green, red or flashing red
and then you have separate control for the camera. So if you long hold the button it will turn on the light then you
have the different modes of the LED on the bottom. So if I tap I'll go through four different options
so single menu very simple and then for the camera you can see this rotating red light that indicates
it's recording if I press the button again this will go into pause mode. So it's flashing
if I tap it again and start recording and if I hold I can actually shut off the taillights.
That's a really nice feature so if you don't want the camera you just want more run time with your
taillight you can run it in just a simple tail light mode and then if you want the camera you can
turn that on separately. You have mode memory here so if I shut this off and then hold again
you can see it re-initializes I get my LEDs on the bottom in the same mode I was in and then this
will go back to a standard recording mode when you first turn on and you can again turn it off.
So pretty simple design you also have a USB type-c charging port on the side then you have the memory
card slot on the other side. So a little micro SD card that's a little bit hard to pull out
but once you get it in there it's nice and secure and you can push down the rubber gasket. [Music]
Now let's take a look at some video footage from the camera as you can see here if you're on rough
roads the video can be pretty jarring. There is no image stabilization so every bump or divets in the
road is really shown in the video on familiar roads it's not that bad and the clarity of the
video is actually pretty good. You can make out license plates and you have a good wide
field of view. This is very similar to a wide setting on a GoPro and you can see here the cars
and everything is over-exposed. You can also see if we freeze it that the license plate is readable here.
We have a side by side on the same bike with the GoPro Hero 11 and the 1080 setting and the Seemee
DV you can see they're pretty similar. Obviously the GoPro has better color and image depth but
as far as the clarity they're pretty similar as they have the same resolution which is pretty
impressive. The big difference is obviously that image stabilization the GoPro is silky smooth
and they've really refined that algorithm but obviously it's much more expensive and you're not
going to be able to run it for the same runtimes as they can overheat and have multiple screens.
We also tried the nighttime riding with the camera and it works surprisingly well. As with a lot of
cameras you can see it's pretty grainy in low light situations you can't see the details quite
as well but you still see everything around you and again you have a full car width around you so
you can make out details and if something were to happen you could always review the footage.[Music]
Now let's take a look at the app. Magicshine has used a standard off the shelf app called
CAR_DVR, it's pretty basic and it's obvious they didn't really spend any money on the user
interface. You can see three basic tabs on the bottom where you can access the camera
browser, local save files, the camera and then settings. So under camera once you've connected
to the Wi-Fi spot with the appropriate password you can see we actually get a live image.
Here you can see my bike poster you can take images of that so screenshots
and then you can do a recording or stop recording and you'll see this will actually
update the colors. So you can see while it's recording and then when you pause it it'll flash
and then screenshot actually has no user feedback but you just save it then you can actually access
the files here so if you don't want to remove the memory card and go to camera browser and then you
can see all the recordings here with the size. Incidents are saved in the separate
tab and then you have photos so if you look at it on the photos you can see they're all there
and then you can click on these and view the video footage. It's pretty basic and you
can see the UI requires you to press edit and then do multi-select if you want to save it
but I highly recommend just using a micro SD card. The other thing is you can do basic settings on
here so under camera setting you can change it from 1080 down to 720, if you want to have more
footage you can change the flicker frequency from 50 to 60. Looping you can actually change
from one two to three or even turn it off just a real-time video. You can adjust the exposure and
the default you can see it's pretty high up so kind of wash the details out but it's brighter.
Autobalance doesn't have an option and then you can sync the time which is something
you definitely want to do so you have the proper time on the little overlays. Also you can reset the camera and
format the SD card. So pretty basic but would have been nice to see more effort in a separate app that would
combine some of the cycling data such as speed or other features to make a little more fun to share.
Now lets go over the pros and cons of the Seemee DV. What we like about it is as a unique design. Although it's a little
bit bulky it has a nice streamlined shape you also have good video quality a really simple
user interface with the two buttons that you control the taillight and the camera independently.
Also you have great side visibility with the three LED strips so you have 360 degree visibility.
Some of the negatives of this Seemee DV is a fact that it does lack image stabilization so if you're
riding on rough roads the video can be a little bit jarring. Also Magicshine is used a basic free
app instead of creating their own one so the user interface on the app is pretty clumsy. Taking
everything into account would give the Semee DV an 8.9 out of 10. Its easy to use and really affordable
camera tail light combination. Thanks for watching this review don't forget to like and subscribe.
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