VAVA CD001 Dash Cam Competition - Thank yous and Requests for a Review.

Hi All,

So as Xev noted in the thread here, I'm the lucky winner of the VAVA CD001 Dash Cam, so first of all thanks to Xev and SunValley.

This is all very new to me - I can't remember winning any other competitions and I haven't really reviewed any other products before in-depth either, so I'll be blunt and say I really have no idea what I'm doing. But I will try to be as objective as possible while being appropriately grateful and appreciative of their generosity. Yes I understand they received valuable feedback and PR from this, but Xev certainly didn't need to nominate OzBargain as the place for the giveaway or suggest a giveaway at all, so imo that was a great way to give back to the community, and I certainly would like to encourage other vendors and reps to emulate this if at all possible.

Also full disclosure - I have zero affiliation with Xev or VAVA or SunValley other than being the winner here and putting in my thoughts on the dashcam in the thread and being picked as the winner. I'm also not being required to review the unit, and I'm not receiving anything for reviewing it. I'm fairly sure given my oft-time outspokenness (yes, that's probably an understatement) I wouldn't make a great public face for any brand/company anyway. I want to provide a review to help others here, and again to encourage potentially other vendors to consider OzBargain positively (I also don't have any affiliation to OzBargain other than being a member, if that's relevant) So again I'll try to be objective, but feel free to call out anything that you feel I'm lacking in impartiality in.

Ok - with that out of the way, and again since I haven't reviewed anything ever, this is my current plan for the review once the unit arrives:

1. Unboxing/Installation/Set-up: What's in the box, legibility of the manual, ease and time taken, wiring and charging, any quirks or things of special note;

2. App: Much of the functionality and settings are via the App so I will be reviewing the App (android version) for things like options, ease and intuitiveness of use, functionality, video/photo review quality, transfer speeds, etc;

3. Core Performance: Daytime, Night-time and Wet-weather (weather permitting, ironically) picture quality for both videos and photos, legibility of number plates at various distances, angles and speeds, sound recording (probably keep this off for legal liability purposes - both because sound recording has a lot more legal limits, and more cynically, conversation inside the car can only hurt any potential case, not help it);

4. Other functionality (this should really be 3b, but that'd mess up numbering formatting): G-sensor performance (I'll smack my car with my hands and hopefully not actually put a dent into it), Parking mode performance (again, smack my car while it's parked/off), and the Remote Snapshot Button functionality.

5. Conclusions, real life use experiences, miscellaneous functions, features, issues, and other random thoughts and opinions. I unfortunately have only used 2 other dashcams so while I'll try to include comparative notes, I'll be up-front that they're anecdotal and really not to be relied on (and so I'll limit my opinions in this area if I think it'll detract instead of add to the value of the review).

So that's it - anything else I may have missed to include or mention or that people are interested in knowing about the dash cam, I guess let me know here so I can keep an eye out for those when I'm using/testing the unit, hopefully nothing too technical because I have no qualifications in this area.

Thanks all.