Thinkware F70 Professional sprint cam assessment: Extra satisfactory than ‘Professional’

The $100 Thinkware F70 Professional is a blended bag of a touch cam expertise. With 1440p now widespread, the F70 Professional’s 1080p is notable by comparability, and its captures are hardly the perfect we’ve seen at that decision.

The digicam is svelte and good-looking; nonetheless, it lacks a show — as an alternative counting on the telephone app for viewing and configuration. That will be high-quality, however the app doesn’t assist the quite well-liked Google Pixel telephone. Moreover, GPS is a $40 exterior choice, and with out buy of a relentless energy cable (hard-wire, OBDII), parking surveillance can’t be used.

Given all that, fairly frankly, we’re questioning precisely why it’s labeled as “Professional.”

Additional studying: See our roundup of the perfect sprint cams to find out about competing merchandise.

What are the F70 Professional’s options?

The F70 Professional is a front-only, 1080p, 30fps, 140 diploma field-of-view single-channel sprint cam. It could be faraway from its semi-adhesive sticky mount for safekeeping, and it sports activities an auxiliary port energy cable that connects to the digicam by way of a small coaxial energy port. Yup, nonetheless no Sort-C from Thinkware.

Small and cylindrical, the F70 Professional measures a mere 3.23-inches vast, by round 1.35 inches thick. It weighs only one.49 ounces (42.4 grams) so it received’t unduly stress the mount. Stated mount is adjustable vertically, however not horizontally so watch out that it’s oriented appropriately whenever you stick it to the windshield.

There’s a Wi-Fi-enable/Bluetooth-connect button on one finish, subsequent to the GPS port and simply in entrance of the standing LED. The opposite finish sports activities the Rec button, which saves your present recording so it isn’t overwritten.

The F70 Professional accepts as much as a 128GB SD card. At round 100MBps per minute with 30fps/1080p captures, that’s sufficient for about 21 hours. Not dangerous, however many more recent sprint cams will settle for 256GB and even 512GB playing cards, which clearly enables you to take much more video earlier than older captures are culled. Once more, Professional?

Thinkware pioneered the display-less, phone-centric sprint cam design. Nonetheless, progenitor or not, if you happen to’re counting on a telephone app for altering settings, you need to assist all telephones. As I instructed you up entrance, the corporate’s Sprint Cam app doesn’t assist Google’s Pixels, a extremely popular telephone and, as luck would have it, the telephone I usually use for testing. The corporate’s different Cloud app doesn’t assist the F70 Professional, so I used to be caught having to seek out one other system.

Thinkware has mentioned that this lack of assist is one thing peculiar to Google; nonetheless, each different vendor’s Android app has labored simply high-quality on my Pixel. Methinks the corporate protests an excessive amount of, and I feel I’ve minimize them slack lengthy sufficient for this persistent deficiency. A half star off. Repair it.

What’s the standard of the F70 Professional’s captures?

The F70 Professional’s captures, whereas not as detailed as we see with the brand new breed of 1440p sprint cams, are workable. The processing is nice, with no tearing or jitter whenever you go over a bump.

Nonetheless, I used to be anticipating a bit higher general high quality from a venerable vendor akin to Thinkware. There’s a sure fuzziness to the video, particularly within the evening captures. Colour is essentially correct, however not as vivid as I’ve change into used to in current critiques.

I cleaned my windshield twice for this evening seize, however the fuzziness endured. You may, nonetheless, see the license plate numbers straight forward — barely.

Whereas the F70 Professional’s captures are nothing to jot down residence about, they get the job executed and can serve capably as proof — the primary level of sprint cams. I discovered the g-sensor too delicate at its default setting, and needed to dial it down — as soon as I had a telephone that supported Thinkware’s app.

Observe that though the F70 Professional makes use of an excellent capacitor, the digicam’s standing mild stayed on for a superb 10 seconds once I switched off the facility. That’s about twice regular so that you may seize a little bit of put up power-loss motion.

Must you purchase the Thinkware F70 Professional?

My general expertise with the F70 Professional was middling, largely due to the Google Pixel subject. It’s, nonetheless, straightforward to put in and use, and the captures are workable if not better of breed.

However including GPS and an OBDII cable makes for a minimum of a $160 bundle and fairly frankly, there are higher sprint cams for the worth. Particularly, the Garmin Sprint Cam 47. You may examine its barely pricier 57 cousin right here.