Review: 70mai Dash Cam Lite Review
I commute about 80 miles a day from my home in Simi Valley, CA to Hollywood, CA. I see a lot of accidents and a lot of weird driving habbits. From reading scripts to playing drumsticks on the stearing wheel while driving, drivers are up to some crazy shenanigans. Lately, I have been thinking about how I can protect myself from both irresponsible drivers and have been seeing dash cams a lot lately but always thought they were either too expensive and/or too cheap to be worth buying. That is until 70mai sent me their latest Dash Cam Lite to check out.
70mai is a company who is part of the Mi family but focuses on smart car electronics. Previously, I have written about other Mi products such as the Roidmi F8 Storm — Smart Cordless Vacuum, which is one of the best vacuums I’ve ever used (even over the Dyson!). So I immediately took the chance at reviewing some more products from the Mi ecosystem family.
70mai has put out Dash Cams previously such as the Dash Cam Pro at very reasonable prices, at around $60 plus shipping. But now they have put out a “Lite” version, appropriately called the 70mai Dash Cam Lite. At around $46.99 US (at time of writing this article) if bought via AliExpress.com, plus $23.54 when you add the GPS and Speed module accessory you can have the whole package for around $70 US.
The 70mai Dash Cam Lite is an unobstructive and smooth operating dash cam. One of my pet peeves is buying things that are seemingly easy to use and immediately upon opening the packaging become a 2-day setup. The 70mai Dash Cam Lite is easy to setup and easy to use. One morning before starting my 40 mile commute, I opened the Dash Cam Lite and GPS accessory packaging, flipped through the directions, mounted the Dash Cam Lite to my windshield behind my rearview mirror, and was up and running in the app in under 10 minutes! It was actually remarkable at how easy it was. One caveat is that I knew it did not come with a MicroSD card so I took one out of one of my GoPro cameras and used it. Upon plugging in the 70mai Dash Cam Lite to to the supplied micro USB to USB-A cable, I was asked to format the MicroSD card, turn on the WiFi on the Dash Cam Lite to connect to my Android based phone (where I downloaded the free 70mai app from the Google Play Store), register an account and begin recording on the Dash Cam Lite.
At first I did not enable the WDR function because I wasn’t sure what it was but on my second trip with the Dash Cam Lite I turned it on and realized it is essentially an HDR Photo mode to get better detail in the shadows in highlights of the recorded video. Besides that I saw the green light turn on on the actual Dash Cam Lite and knew it was recording. In terms of MicroSD cards, 70mai describes that Dash Cam Lite needs at least a Class 10 MicroSD card and supports up to 64GB of memory.
The Dash Cam Lite physically has a rear LCD Screen to view what is being recorded, 4 buttons along the screen, and 1 button on the bottom. The bottom button is the power button and the 4 buttons along the screen are for navigating and selecting options within the menus.
The Dash Cam Lite is made with a high quality Sony IMX307 camera sensor that has a field of view (FOV) of 130 degrees, plenty of view for the standard vehicle.
The lens itself has an aperture of f/2.0 which helps in low light recording with microphone and speaker. With the video resolution recording at 1920x1080 at 30 frames per second (fps), the resulting files are .MP4 Quicktimes — small enough in file size yet high enough quality to see exactly what is going on. The Dash Cam Lite comes with a long USB cable for connecting to the cigarette lighter adapter or USB port in your car and running along the inside trim of your car to hide, which will also charge the internal 500 mAh Li-Ion battery. In addition, there is an anti-electrostatic sticker to mount on your windshield that the GPS or regular mount will stick to.
Operationally, the 70mai Dash Cam Lite is easy to setup and use with few options. I really like less options with the Dash Cam Lite, as I get older sometimes I just want things to work without difficult and intricate setups. The Dash Cam Lite from 70mai is easy to setup and get up and running fast. You can designate your record time for clips in 1, 2, or 3 minute increments that will delete the oldest recording when set to Loop mode as the memory card gets full. Along with the normal looped recording while driving, when parked the 70mai Dash Cam Lite has a 24-parking surveillance mode that will kick on recording when it senses action with the G-sensor. You can even set the sensitivity of the G-sensor in the Dash Cam Lite, and when you return to the car you will get an audible alert that action has occurred. With the added GPS mount that I mentioned earlier, you will gain the ability to burn in the GPS and speed data into the video recording. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to change kilometers per hour into miles per hour but I guess a quick conversion isn’t too difficult.
The quality of the recordings from the 70mai Dash Cam Lite are pretty good when it is sunny or bright day time. While I couldn’t quite make out license plate numbers every time, you could identify car models and colors. It’s a little harder to make out faces but you can get a general sense of who is in the car near you.
You can see an example of the 70mai Dash Cam Lite video during the morning, at around 7:22am — take notice of the Date, Time, GPS location, and speed in the upper right hand corner:
I double checked my GPS coordinates and they were accurate.
Once the sun is not directly in the camera’s line of sight, the quality is higher and items are much more legible and discernible. In this clip at about 5:30pm PST, you can see much more info:
And while the night time video is good enough to see an accident and possibly see where and how it occured, it is hard to discern any info like license plates and even colors of cars. This clip from about 6:30pm PST shows just how much is visible.
All that being said, the skies look pretty good!
In the end, I think the low cost, ease of setup, and ease of use overall really makes the 70mai Dash Cam Lite a must buy. The only cons that I can see are the viewing angle being a little short of covering my entire windshield. Incidentally, while my videos have no audio I discovered the microphone was on mute which is easily fixed on the home screen of the 70mai Dash Cam Lite. If you’re looking for an easy to use and inexpensive dash Cam, the 70mai Dash Cam Lite deserves your attention. Buy it now via AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33057449187.html?albbt=1&isdl=y&aff_short_key=uNb6i2f&aff_platform=true&albslr=232981631&src=70maicom&tag1=D08 . And find out more by following 70mai on Twitter @70mai_official.
