After over a week of testing my Owl Cam, here is my abbreviated review:
- Installation is quick and painless
- software limited to IOS for now but intuitive and simple to use
- dashcam video quality is not bad, although does not appear to be as good as my $60 Xiaomi Mijia dashcam I have installed as well.
- "OK Presto" voice command to take snapshot video works fine, but not as useful to me.
- security features:
- I simulated door ding impacts on both sides of the car and Owl Cam did not send an alert nor sense the impact. My perception is that the Owl Cam would only alert on larger impacts but not things like door dings.
- when a person enters the car, the Owl Cam has enough of a delay in capturing who entered that it can be blocked by hand or worse yet be taken without a video recording of the person getting into your car.
- one "feature" the Owl Cam has is heat protection. The cam shuts off when too hot to protect from damage. There have been at least 3x in the last week, where I have entered my car and this thing was fully shut off due to heat and not recording ( what good is a security Cam when off?). Also, it is not even summer yet in SoCal and I envision this device going on constant vacation due to heat.
- yet another "feature" is car battery protection in which the device goes into standby mode after 24 hrs if the car has not been started. I purposely did not start my car for 26 hrs to see how this funtioned and to my surprise, the Owl Cam was shut off, so, if I were to travel and leave my car at the airport for 24 or more hours, the Owl Cam is useless to capture security incidents.
- video quality of Livestream is poor and not sure of the root cause.
My verdict: as a dashcam, on par with most of the $100 dashcams on the market that do 1080p videos except the Owl Cam cannot store locally on an SD card. As a security device, look elsewhere (I may try the Waylens Cam when LTE version is available). This to me is not worth the over $300 price tag. I will be returning mine for a refund ?
Just my 2 cents.
I have a lower end unit dashcam from my previous Jeep however didn't want to clutter up the Stelvio with the cable and visual clutter so would want to mount above in the area of the rear view mirror if it came to it.
