Hi, I'm Robert, one of the car audio editors here at Crutchfield.
Today I want to tell you about this dash cam kit from Pioneer, the VREC-DH300D.
But before I get into the camera, why have a dash cam at all? They're pretty popular in a lot of
other countries and slowly catching on here in the States. One of the biggest reasons is in case
something unfortunate happens during your daily drive: if you're involved in an accident or just
witness something happening, or a deer jumps out in front of your car...happens a lot here in our
part of the country. Having some footage to show what really happened can be an important part of
being at fault or not being at fault. Also, sometimes something fun happens on your drive.
It's nice to have that internet-worthy footage to take home. So whatever the reason, dash cams are a
great addition for your daily commute. Now let's talk about this one. This Pioneer kit includes
a front windshield-mounted camera to record the view of the road in front of you, and also
a rear window-mounted camera to record the view behind you. Both have incredible Sony image sensors
in them; both give you a wide-angle view of the road ahead and behind with incredible detail. Both
cameras record the footage in full HD quality, and that footage is saved to a micro-SD card stored
in the camera. Pioneer includes a 16 GB card in the box, which is great, but you can expand that
up to 128 GB, and I fully recommend you do that, because as footage records and the card fills up,
newer footage will overwrite older footage stored in the card, so having more capacity gives you more
time to take the footage you want to save and get it off the card and onto your computer back home.
The camera, as you see, has an adhesive backing mount that just
lets you stick it right to the windshield, and then you can adjust the angle with this gooseneck hinge
to give you a nice, level shot through the windshield. The camera is powered via a single
cable that plugs into your car's power port. The cable is plenty long, so you can route it around
the windshield and down to the console and keep it out of sight, so no messy cables hanging in the way.
When it comes to adding the rear-view camera, as you can see it has a similarly plenty long cable
that routes through the car back to this camera on the front windshield. It's a single cable,
power and video are all transmitted through it, and the footage is stored on the same
micro-SD card in the camera. And likewise, this one just sticks to your rear window,
and the camera itself has a swivel adjustment so that you can get that same level shot
right out the back window. You can review the footage on the camera's three-inch view screen.
The internal menus and buttons for controlling it are very simple and easy to use.
Two other cool features I want to mention about this camera are GPS and the microphone. It has
a built-in GPS locator, so all the footage is stamped with time, date, and location. The internal
microphone picks up audio from inside the car pretty good and sounds clear on playback, but
it's not going to pick up sound outside the car. The camera is also equipped with a shock sensor,
an accelerometer built in so that in the event of a collision the camera will sense the bump of the
car and it will automatically protect that footage from being overwritten. So that's the Pioneer VREC-DH300D
dash cam kit. If you have any questions about it or any of the other dash cams we carry,
just contact us here at Crutchfield and we'll be glad to help you out. And thanks for watching.