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Want a full and powerful dashcam for your car that includes front and rear cameras and a GPS system? Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ checks out the Thinkware X700 Dash Cam with everything you need in the box, from wires to adhesive, and even a 16GB MicroSD card. Download the Dash Cam Viewer for your PC or Mac and you can even review front and rear video footage simultaneously.
Check out the individual elements at https://www.thinkware.com/
or here's the BestBuy link: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/thinkware-x700-front-and-rear-camera-dash-cam-black-dark-gray/6341885.p
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0:00
A dash cam with rear view camera? Let's check this out
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Dave Taylor here and I'm checking out the Thinkware X700 dash cam with included rear
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view camera. But, it's super hard to do this in my car, so let's switch things around a bit
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Okay, this is so much easier than trying to squeeze everything into the car, but I can
0:27
still give you a great demo and show you all about how this works. Now, let's start out by just looking at the device itself. Like I said, this is the Thinkware
0:36
dash cam X700 and it has a full 2.7 inch LCD touch screen where you can adjust settings
0:46
although you get a lot more access when you use the software on a Mac or PC. Welcome back
0:51
to that. And, it gives you the ability to see what's going on. Here's a photo of it
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where I have it all sort of set up properly and recording. Now, you look at this and
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you think, hmm, how does it go on the windshield? The answer is you have a windshield mount
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So, this has a super sticky adhesive and then you slide your dash cam onto it and you're
1:12
good to go. Lens obviously pointing outward, screen facing you, and then you have two cables
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you have to deal with. The first one is power. So, here's a car charger that hooks into the
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12 volt accessory and used to be called the cigarette lighter. And, the other end of this
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is just a regular power cable. I'm not going to unwind the whole thing, but basically hooks
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in, now you have power. And, if you're thinking, hmm, this is going to be a little unwieldy
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on your windshield, yeah. Go and let's look again at that picture of my having this installed
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on my car. There are two wires hanging down. What's the other one? It's this wire which
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connects the front camera to this guy, which is the rear camera. And, here's the rear camera
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mounted on my back hatchback window. So, it's a little bit of fiddling to get it to be the
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right angle, but it's not too bad because if you leave your car running, this is running
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the screen is displaying and you can adjust it. Go and look at the screen, adjust it
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look at the screen until you get it just right. So, basically that's everything. We have a
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cable for connecting the dash cam to the rear camera. We have the rear camera. We have
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the front camera. We have the charging cable. We have the windshield mount. But, here's
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the thing is what really is going on is it's all being written to this tiny little micro
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SD card. Now, it can work with anywhere from a 16 gig to 128 gig tiny card and it writes
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in a revolving fashion. So, basically, you know, it will fill up the card and then it'll
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delete the oldest possible file and replace it, oldest and replace it. So, you always
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have whatever, the last 60 minutes, the last three hours, the last day, whatever it is
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depending on how big your card is. You look at that and you're like, okay, well, how do
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I access that on my computer? Well, they thought of that too because it comes with
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a micro SD to SD card adapter. Easy enough. You slip this in and now you have something
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you can put into your computer. Now, let me just actually, before we get there, let me
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tell you just a little bit more about this because it has a lot of cool stuff on it
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It also, by the way, lets you review your videos though it's a pretty small screen
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If you're used to a fancy modern smartphone, then that's not very much. But it does record
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in full 1080p HD at 30 frames per second, both cameras. So, that's pretty cool. And
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it does have all sorts of stuff like driver assist safety alerts, forward collision warning
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front lane departure warnings, lane departure warnings, all this sort of stuff that you
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can turn on or off. And then the camera has 140 degree wide angle view and it also has
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a wide dynamic range video. So, it's trying to get rid of the shadows by filling that
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data in. We'll look at some samples. We'll see if it does that. It also features the
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Sony Starvis night vision system. Didn't get much chance to test that for this. Unfortunately
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there's some demos actually on their site you can go check out. But it's definitely
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helpful too because, hey, we don't just drive during the day, right? We drive at night
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So, thermal protection, it can handle minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit
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Really good. And it has anti-file corruption on the chip or on the card. So, that's also
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helpful. Enough said. Let's look at some examples. So, first, I'm going to open up my PC. I'm
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going to put the micro SD card in the SD card. I'm going to put that in the PC. And then
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we're going to go ahead and we'll open it up and we'll have a look at just some sample
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footage. And then while we're looking at the footage, well, you know what? Let's just switch
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over and get onto there. So, now you can see here's the sample footage and I'm not giving
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you the audio. It does also record audio, but I was listening to an audio book when
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I was doing this and I don't have the rights to give you that content. So, I can't actually
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let you listen to my audio book. But, suffice to say, if there's honking or crashes or people
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are talking in the car, it would pick all that up totally fine. Notice that the big
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window is the front. The small window is the rear. In a little bit, I'll show you another
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sample where you can switch the two if you want to have the rear view be the larger window
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So the PC Viewer app is actually pretty cool. It works with PC and Mac, but I will warn
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you, as of this moment with Mac OS Mojave 10.15, I found that the Thinkware Dash Cam
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Viewer app for the Mac isn't working. I am confident that by the time you watch this
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video, they'll have a new version that does work, but for right now, I was finding that
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it was definitely easier for me to work on my PC than to work on my Mac. Not a huge crisis
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there, but what's cool also is that the actual data that's on the card, you know, the actual
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data that this thing's writing is just video content, so you can pull those video files
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directly. Here's an example of me just grabbing the forward camera, and you can see it's really
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clean. It does a really nice job. Let's switch to the rear view. Same thing, you know, it
6:37
looks really good. It's a really slick little device here with a lot of power. So the only
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thing left to talk about really is the price and the configuration, and that gets a little
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complicated, and I had some issues with this too. So first off, I have to say they had
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to send me a replacement rear view camera. The first one I got was just super flaky
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but the Thinkware customer service was insanely friendly. They were like right on it, and
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I emailed them, I told them what was going on, and boom, it was in the mail, the new
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one. Super easy. They didn't even wait for me to send the old one back, which of course
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I did, and you should too. So that was super easy, but the whole configuration's a little
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complicated. So they sent me the rear view camera, they sent me the X700, you know, they
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sent me this all in pieces, and they didn't send me the GPS unit. But in the United States
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at least, your primary retail outlet for this is Best Buy, and Best Buy has it as a package
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deal that includes the X700 camera setup, and the rear view camera, and the GPS, all
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at a bundle price. Now the bundle price is actually a really good price, but it's sort
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of complicated to figure out how this all fits together. So hang on, before we get to
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the actual numbers of the price, let me just ask if you can subscribe to my channel. I
7:55
really appreciate that you do that. Thank you. Now, I know all the component prices
8:02
but of course you really probably just want to go to BestBuy.com and pick it up as a bundle
8:07
But let's start with the individual pieces. So the X700 with charging cable, and all the
8:12
basics that you need for just a front view camera, will cost you $149.99. The rear view
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camera adds another $79.99. The GPS antenna, which I don't have so I can't show you, is
8:26
another $39.99. Or you can pick that whole setup, everything I have, you can pick it
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all up at Best Buy for $249. So that's actually probably a lot easier. And then the only thing
8:38
you might optionally need to buy is they have a hardwire option. And once you have this
8:43
thing hardwired in, then it's on your battery in your car, even when your car's off. And
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that's when you get into cool things like having a motion sensor for when it's parked
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or when it's overnight. So if someone comes up to your car and starts messing with the
8:59
lock, you should be able to capture that. Although of course it's not side view cameras
9:03
it's front and back cameras. But with that wide angle, you're probably going to catch
9:07
someone in the act. Now if they break in and take your camera, then it doesn't really solve
9:13
the problem. But generally speaking, if you like come out of your, you know, in the morning
9:17
and your car, someone hit it, you can go back and look. And this has sensors that will turn
9:22
on the camera automatically if it's hardwired. If you just use these sort of wires and let
9:28
them dangle all over your car like I do, then you don't get those benefits. That is
9:32
true of every dash cam out there. It's just the nature of how the power works. So with
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that, I have to say that it took a little doing to get this thing to work. And I'm disappointed
9:43
that the Mac software is not functional at this exact moment. But you know what? This
9:48
is a really nice solution. And I don't know that I would actually worry so much about
9:52
the rear camera. But I suppose depending on why you want this in the first place, it might
9:57
be useful to have photographic or video proof that someone rear-ended you or something
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In any case, this is fun. And if you do a lot of scenic drives, this can be a really
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fun way to capture it and capture the audio that you have from inside your car too. So
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both of those are pretty handy. And with that, I am going to hook this back up in my car
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which means I'll catch you in my next video
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