Last Updated on 14 May 2020 by Colette Burgess
This post features gifted product & contains affiliate links
I do a lot of driving. I always have really. An hour after I got my first car I picked Woody up and drove to Manchester to go and see friends. It’s been like that ever since. I’ve averaged about 20,000 miles per year since I was 19. I’m 35 now, so that works out at approximately 320,000 miles. Nearly a third of a million! Everyday you see some pretty hairy sights on public highways. Not just idiot drivers who take no account of the conditions, or drive like they own the road. There’s a million things that can and do go wrong, I’ve been wiped out by a lorry. Had blow outs on the motorway. Crashed a few times and been crashed into more than once.
It’s no surprise to me that Dash Cams are becoming more and more prevalent. You can buy them from ebay pretty cheap. However, given the cheap electronics I’ve bought over the years I don’t imagine you are getting much for your money with the cheapest Dash Cams. This however is not a cheap one. This is a premium Dash Cam from a big manufacturer. The ASUS Reco Classic Car Dash Cam is a Full HD recording camera with a wide angle lens and advanced driver aids!
{Please excuse my husband’s shamefully dirty windscreen!}
In the box you get the Cam itself, a suction cup windscreen mount with a GPS antennae built in, a second mount which has a sticky pad rather than a suction cup and a rather long mini USB cable with a 12v car socket on the end. I’m not sure how big the cars are that ASUS used to test this system, but I can plug this cable into the socket in the boot and the cable still reaches to the windscreen! It’s a long cable. You also get an instruction manual and some sticky clips to hold the long cable in place if you were to have the Dash Cam more permanently fixed into your car. What you don’t get is a micro SD card. I find missing essentials annoying in this day and age. You literally can’t record a second of footage without a micro SD card. It should be in the box. Just charge £5 more and include the card. As a consumer I shouldn’t have to mess around with second purchases to make the first purchase work.
Anyway, the unit itself feels solid. The build quality is good. The mount attaches to the camera part with a satisfying click and the suction cup gets a good grip onto your windscreen with little effort. The GPS sensor is housed in a box on the suction cup. You push this box towards the suction cup to get a good seal. It works well. There’s a small screen on the back of the cam and five buttons under it. These are power, up and down arrows, record and back. As soon as you plug the Cam into the 12v socket it beeps at you and the LED over the top of the screen goes green. Press the record button and the LED turns red. Its recording and you’re away.
That’s what I did the first morning I used the unit. 45 miles, mainly on the motorway. It must have been very boring for the Cam but it didn’t complain once. That was pretty much it. It just sits there and records. You forget it’s there pretty quickly.
I’m going to be trying out the ASUS Reco Classic Car Dash Cam over the next week or so and I’ll get back to you with my thoughts!
*Disclaimer – We were sent the Asus Dash Cam free of charge for the purposes of review and we have been compensated for our time however all thoughts and opinions remain our own*