Blackvue DR900X-2CH Plus Review

hey guys this is john from uf dash camera today i got a review on the newest top of the line dash camera from blackvue the dr900x2 channel plus edition so blackvue did send this out for review so i'd like to thank them for sending this review unit out i also have the previous dr 900x from last year the previous generation and i'm going to do some comparisons but first let's talk about the 900 series as usual guys if you are interested in purchasing any of the cameras i talked about in this review check down in the description where i will have affiliate links for blackboxmycar.com where you can get five percent off your purchase or if you prefer amazon i do have amazon affiliate links too that do help support my channel so the 900 series is blackvue's line of 4k dash cameras so the front is 4k the rear is just 1080p this plus edition the x plus is the third generation of the 900 series the first one was the 900s which came out at least three years ago the second generation the 900x added the ability to connect a 4g lte module that allows you to connect directly to the cloud without using a wi-fi hotspot now for those of you that are pretty new to blackvue blackvue does excel in the cloud department i would argue they have the best cloud features of any dash camera brand so i will be using the 900x plus in the same installation that i had my original 900x i do currently use the tamper resistant case or mount they call it tamper proof but i would say it's more tamper resistant you can see i put the original 900x right next to it in a standard mount and also you can see where i have the 4g lte module since this is more of a upgraded model i'm not going to cover all of the features that all blackvue cameras have or this series of cameras have for instance the parking mode is something i've covered in so many videos i'm going to provide a link down in the description to where you can see the original 900x review where i do cover the advanced parking mode features for instance the automatic buffered parking mode and time lapse option but also i'm not going to go too in depth into the cloud features now for those of you that are new check out my review i'll link down in the description but a quick rundown is with blackvue's really advanced cloud features if you're using either a wi-fi hotspot or that 4g lte module the camera can be connected to the cloud while driving or while in parking mode and then you can receive notifications if someone hits your parked car you can view live streams see what's going on around your car while you're away from it and you of course you can upload clips to the cloud so if someone impacts your car while it's parked it'll save a copy to the cloud but if you want to use the 4g lte module you will need a sim card i personally use a t-mobile two gigabyte data plan that's only ten dollars a month i found that to be the best deal now looking at the two cameras the only difference i noticed i left this plastic on here so i didn't mix them up while doing this comparison but the original model said gps slash bluetooth the new model just says gps the new model says b slash wl and the lower or the old model says lte wi-fi now i had to be sure to see what bwl meant but as i expected it stands for bluetooth wi-fi and lte so that's the only physical difference i noticed with the new plus model so one interesting thing with this generation is that if you buy the one channel option it actually has the plug for the rear camera that's the first time blackvue has done that and i believe that might be due to the chip shortage i think they're trying to streamline their product line and that's a real great thing because you can buy the front camera one channel version at first if you'd like and then add the rear camera but i will point out though if you have the original 900 x model these cameras are different so you're gonna have to upgrade to the two channel option even if you have the original 900x but luckily the cables the power cables and everything are all the same so you won't have to rip all the cords out of your car now one of the first things people are going to wonder is how is the video quality i will say the 4k on the front is definitely a noticeable improvement especially during the day there's a lot more detail and you can see things like license plates and signs from further away the original 900x was pretty much just like the 900s it uses the same chipset and that was one of my disappointments with the 900x is that they didn't improve the video quality at all but this is definitely a step up from the 900x and 900s model one example here during the day you can see the building on the top left of both cameras there's a lot better wide dynamic range of the new plus model but in general i feel like license plates and details such as plants or or blades of grass are a lot easier to see and it's got a better definition even at high speed so that's going to be a lot more useful for trying to read license plates if you ever need to in an accident during the night the front footage i feel like sometimes the original looks better sometimes the new one looks better i'd say overall the new one is probably better but one example you could see is where these neon signs in motion seemed to be a little bit more crisp in the original model but then in this other example where this white car is driving in front of me off to the left side you can clearly see the license plate better on the plus model and i think that's what most people are going to care about this is where you couldn't read the license plate on the new model i couldn't read it on the old model anyways either so you know you can be the judge i'll post the full comparison videos down in the description because i'm not going to include the whole videos in this review now when it comes to the rear footage i do have to have a disclaimer i originally posted some comparisons and i showed the samples to blackvue and they agreed with me that my original rear camera was defective so you can see on some of these clips that the right side of the screen of the rear camera was very blurry compared to the left side now when i was doing this comparison though some of these shots you could clearly see that there was more definition and clarity in the new plus model for example you can read this car's license plate or the sign in the background a lot better than you can in the original 900x model so since there was a defect in that though they sent out a replacement and i will admit that blurriness on some blackvue cameras has been an issue as long as i've been using blackvue cameras now this is only the second one that i've had but about six to seven years ago my original blackvue dr 550 had a blurry lens and i actually adjusted it myself but if you order a black view camera and have an issue like that you can just contact them and they should help you out now the rear footage at night i think is definitely going to be controversial you can clearly see that the original camera is very grainy and the new one looks really smooth and when there's just enough light source such as brake lights i think the new one is just fine but there's certain times where it seems like the old one even though it is grainier you can actually make out those license plates a little bit better i will say though even though with this night footage of the rear camera i'm not too concerned with that i think anyone that's going to hit and run me in a parking lot their license plate is going to be plenty visible with their brake lights and going right up to the back of my vehicle i think both cameras will capture an incident like that in a dark parking lot just fine but it is something to note while driving around the night at high speed both cameras are going to be too blurry to read license plates of cars that are moving by you quickly so i think at this point of time you know the weird rear camera night quality doesn't deter me from still suggesting that overall the new plus model has better video quality now there have been some differences in this camera with the app and some of the parking features so i wanted to talk about those now one of the great new updates that also affects uh the previous generation cameras or at least some of them through a firmware upgrade is you don't have to type in your really long wifi ssid and password name now you can just connect to the app and with the built-in bluetooth that the original 900x even has you can just use the app and directly connect to it and then it asks if you want to connect to its wi-fi so it's a lot easier a lot quicker now also if you are using the 4g lte module your blackvue dash camera can act as a hotspot and up to five devices can connect to it while it's powered i'm not quite sure who's going to be using that feature maybe families that are on a road trip but you'd think if the camera has service then any anyone's cell phones would have service too but the options there now and that's pretty cool that you can piggyback off it as a wi-fi hotspot with five devices now one thing i noticed is besides the fact that the camera only offers h.265 encoding now which is the video encoding that allows them to have this 4k video files without being really large i believe blackvue actually said the 4k files with h265 encoding are actually smaller than the previous 1080p uh generations of cameras with h.264 encoding so now they just don't even give you that option it's just the newer encoding but also i noticed that there's no high dynamic range or brightness settings i found that really strange because with some of the complaints i've been seeing some people have about the rear camera you think they would allow you to possibly bump that brightness up or adjust the high dynamic range but those options are no longer here now while i didn't want to touch on parking mode too much one great new update i noticed and is something that really affected my daily use the parking mode timer now allows you to choose a specific hour previous models allowed you to choose 6 hour increments such as 6 12 24 48 or infinite my issue was that i don't drive very much my commute is less than 10 minutes each way and even with my really big dual purpose deep cycle 92 amp hour battery after about five days the dr900x with the 4g lte module is a bit of a power hog so after about five days of going to work throughout the week by thursday or friday i would be getting low voltage warnings from the dash camera and that's when i was using a 12 hour time limit the reason i chose 12 hours is because i'm usually at work from eight to nine hours i want the camera to be recording in parking mode that whole time six hours is not enough time unless i went out to lunch and restarted that timer so now after several weeks of testing i set it to nine hours because i'm usually never at work for longer than nine hours and after several weeks i have not gotten any low voltage warnings so i really love that blackvue offered this feature and it's something i've been looking forward to having or hoping to have for quite a while now while they have added some of these newer features there's still one feature i still have been dying to get and i've mentioned it in previous reviews and i hope blackvue might hear this and try to work on it but with the gps features they do allow you to get notifications such as when your vehicle leaves a area that you set via geofence geofencing i think this would be good for you know parents who are making sure their kids aren't leaving town or fleet vehicles for companies making sure they're not going out of certain areas but what i would really like to see is a geo fencing option that would allow you to set the camera to shut off parking mode as soon as you got home while i'm parked in the garage or i would rather have a regular security camera i'm not draining my battery overnight that's why i was having so much issue with the low voltage with the previous model because every night it stayed on for 12 hours even though it's in that lower power state uh parking mode it's still using power especially with the 4g lte module so you know hopefully that can come in the future now i do want to reiterate though this problem of mine is because my commute is less than 10 minutes a day so i'm simply just not charging my car battery up enough like the average driver would which is why i'm having this issue with draining my battery too much with a longer time limit during parking mode now the average commute of most american drivers is probably a lot longer than mine anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes or even as long as an hour each way so this is a problem that might be exclusive to me but either way i really appreciate it so guys overall i do really like this upgrade some people are going to be wondering if this is worth upgrading from one of the 750 series cameras or from the previous 900s or 900x and i think it's all going to come down to what's in your budget the camera starts at 480 dollars i believe so that's a lot to swallow if you already have the 900x model maybe maybe it's not worth upgrading if you have the 900s and want the cloud features but don't want to deal with the hassle of hardwiring some sort of wi-fi hotspot this is a much more elegant solution and even though a lot of people are going to think the rear camera at night may have been a downgrade in some ways or in certain instances i still think overall this camera is an improvement so guys if you are interested in purchasing this camera or maybe you're interested in purchasing the original 900x or any of the other blackvue cameras such as the 750 model series check the links down in the description they do help support my work on this channel and i'd like to thank you guys for watching and supporting my channel if you like this video of my other videos i'd appreciate if you hit like and subscribe and as usual drive safe thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: USDashCamera

Views: 6,977

Keywords: dr750x, dr750, dr750x-2ch, dr750s, 2ch, lte, 4g

Id: yz0kF9r_GXM

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021