Check out the DRA1 by AUKEY. It's cheap, well made, and will do what you need a dashcam to do.
I’ve wanted a dash cam ever since I saw all those videos of that meteorite flash over Russia back in 2013. I’ve looked into them periodically. At first they were kind of expensive and a pain to set up. But since then they’ve gotten a lot cheaper and easier to use. A professionally installed dash cam looks the best - and I don’t know why car makers don’t just offer a built in option - but you cannot beat the price of some of the dash cams on the market now. Especially if you don’t care about dangling wires or using sticky tape.
Enter the AUKEY DRA1 which they sent me to review. It’s a 140° 1080p front facing dash cam that costs a whopping $40. I can’t complain about it since they sent me one to evaluate for free - that they let me keep by the way - but even if I paid $40, I wouldn’t regret the purchase because it’s good for what it is.
The first thing you should know about this dash cam is that it doesn’t have any internal storage so you will need to purchase an SD card. I found an open box amazon warehouse Samsung 128 gb card for $15 so it’s not too big of an added expense, but it is something to be aware of if you look at this camera.
At this price point there are also going to be some compromises made. The unit has to be plugged in to work. It has no internal battery. (AUKEY makes plenty of inexpensive power banks that you can use as an external charger though). It also uses a mini USB to cigarette charger to power the device. However, AUKEY makes excellent flush fit dual port cigarette adapters (one of which I previously reviewed) so I don’t know why they just didn’t ditch the cable they sent and just put in one of those and a USB cable.
But what do you want for $40 - or, in my case, for free? Well, what you do want is a straightforward dash cam that is easy to setup and use. And this is easy to set up and use. I found the instructions to be straightforward and had the DRA1 attached to my windshield using the enclosed suction cup mount (they also have a sticky tape mount) and was recording boring trips to the supermarket with no issues at all.
You can toggle the sound, the motion sensitivity (before you ask, it does not have built-in GPS) and the resolution and that’s about it. Here’s the instruction manual so you can see what it is fully capable of doing.
What’s the video look like? Again, pretty darn good for a $40 camera. Here’s a very long and very boring video that I filmed with the dash cam of an expedition I took to the Carnegie Art Museum in downtown Pittsburgh.
And here’s a shorter video showing what the night capabilities of the camera are like.
The camera itself is pretty nondescript but well constructed. It’s very light and weighs next to nothing. The lightness makes it feel sort of chintzy, but while it might not feel like a bonus in a quality consumer electronic device, let’s face it, if you got in an accident would you really want to chance having a heavy black rectangle pop off the mount, smash into the windscreen, and bounce around the interior? Probably not. So the low mass of the camera is more a feature than a bug and you don’t hold the thing anyway so who cares how it “feels in your hand.”
So in closing, if you’re looking for an inexpensive dash cam for you car so you can capture that one in a million meteor light show, or the more mundane and much more likely person cutting you off or equipment falling of a truck and damaging your vehicle, then this is the dash cam for you. It’s cheap, functional, and reliable.
AUKEY makes really decent consumer electronics at really competitive price points. If you need a dash cam and don’t want to spend a lot you’d be crazy not to buy this one.
POST SCRIPT
I was chatting was my father about this dash cam and he went out and bought one. Unlike me he had some issues getting it mounted to the windshield.
He thinks AUKEY needs a better instruction booklet and you tube videos to show you how the camera mount works and how to set up the camera. He had bolts popping off and had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to mount the camera so it was facing out.
Maybe AUKEY should use pictograms like IKEA or Apple.