[LOFT]

I’m writing in this forum because it is a more well developed arena for good information as well as informed opinion.

I recently purchased a NextBase 322GW refurbished from Best Buy Canada. I wanted it for a long road trip (1500 miles) with a rental car. And then to either use it for road trips with my X5, or a permanent installation.

My experience with the product and NextBase generally was OK, but not inspiring. First, it’s good that NextBase offers customer service on a low to medium priced product, but it’s the kind where there are a pool of CS reps and it takes 24-48 hours to get a response to a question. So, if you have an immediate issue you have to spend time in reading “support materials” and hopefully get the right answer. Over time, I might have become more proficient on using the device.

The product worked pretty well during the trip, but it was “buggy”. Several times the device shut down or it simply stopped recording or identified a memory card failure.

I had purchased a high end 128 GB card and re-booting the device started everything working again. NextBase’s position was that I should only use the NextBase memory card.

Loading the videos on to my phone was uneven…perhaps it was the local wifi, I’m not sure but between the memory card issue and the loading issue, I never felt really confident that the device was going to capture an important event, ie. such jerk cutting me off resulting in an accident.

The device is set to record in 60 second cycles, and that worked well. I’m not sure why anyone would need more than that, and I would erase the file because I’m not capturing images for the purpose of memorializing the road trip.

I guess the other point is that the device is pretty sophisticated in capturing real time data, GPS, etc. which would be good in the event of an accident.

At the same time, it just feels like it’s trying to do too much and overly complex for something that could be a simple dash cam. NextBase recommends leaving “tracking” option always on, so between that and shutting off the microphone because I caught myself swearing at other drivers on a regular basis, there is the privacy issue.

At this point, I’ve concluded that this is fine for road trips but it’s another headache for day to day ownership and driving.

One final point is that the image capture of the camera is pretty good, and would be improved even more with an available polarization filter.

I welcome the forum’s thoughts.