Have you ever been in a car accident? Yeah, it’s something we all want to avoid, but being prepared with the right equipment can make all the difference. In this blog post, we will take a deep dive into the 70mai Omni Dash Cam, exploring its features, installation process, and overall performance.
So inside the box here, it’s bright silver. My dash cam comes in a nice box. Let’s open that up here inside. We’ve got “Hello, I’m MaiX.” Here’s the actual camera. Please remove the protective film before you start using it. Take this off to see the LCD screen, power port, and adjustment mechanisms.
When this is connected to the windshield, you still have the ability to adjust the angle and tilt. I really like that. It’s nice to have that adjustment, and it’s really stiff. Take the little lens cap off there. It’s a decent-sized lens, and you got a nice big speaker down here on the bottom of it. There’s a power button and up and down arrow buttons right there. That’s the extent of the actual buttons on the device.
Looks like you probably have a little microphone right there. This is going to be the accessory port or cigarette lighter port, the 70mai right there, and then another USB port. So you do get to retain use of a USB power port. We’ve also got a lot of cable in here. This is going to be the USB-C power. So this is going to be USB-C to USB-A for powering this if you’re just going to use your cigarette lighter.
Oh, that’s nice. They do include a little pry tool here. This is to hide the wires in between your trim. You have an instruction manual here, fairly small but very readable. And then something else that’s optional is the hardware kit. So this is the 70mai hardware kit, and this is to hardwire the dash cam into your car. This is the non-4G hardware kit, so this is non-cellular, just a straight hardware kit that allows you to plug power into the 70mai camera.
Your yellow, black, and red wires go into either your fuse box or into the accessory line in your vehicle. Depending on your vehicle, you have to consult your own vehicle manual to know where to connect this. This also gives you additional features like parking monitoring and such. When your car is off, you can have additional options because then you can wire this up to be constant power.
Alright, let’s get into installing this into this Audi. I’m going to put it here just to the left of the rearview mirror. You can play around with it, but I do recommend that you eyeball where you want to place it. And then I use the electrostatic piece of plastic first, which will make it a lot easier to remove if I ever want to remove it from the windshield itself.
Got it installed. Used the hinge there to get it properly leveled and aligned and then plugged in the USB-C cable to the right side of the camera itself. You can then plug in the other end of the USB cable into the included accessory port or cigarette lighter socket and turn the car on. As soon as you turn the car on, the camera will power on automatically. It will boot up, make this fun little chiming noise, and go 360 degrees around to calibrate the camera.
[Device: Please connect your app to activate the dash cam]
Once you download and install the app, you can have it search for the camera. It should find it right away, or you can select it from the list of included cameras. Once it connects, you’ll activate the camera itself. It’ll authorize it and start connecting to it. This was all very automated and very smooth. It just worked.
Then a cool animation appears, which I thought was neat that they went to all this work to include this animation built right into the app when you first install it. I haven’t seen it since, but the first time you activate the camera, you click the start button, and then it will go into the device itself.
From here, you can change settings, but if you connect directly to it via the hotspot, it’ll ask you if you want to join the hotspot. You click Join, and now you’re directly connected to the camera itself. The first time you do that, it will ask if you want to go through the beginner’s tutorial. I do recommend that. It has you set up the language and gives you a visual guide on how to install the camera. You could plug in the camera before you install it, and then you’d make use of this installation guide. I saw this after I had already installed the camera because I just followed the instruction manual included in the box. Either way, they have great instructions on how to install the camera on your windshield.
This next section helps you calibrate the camera left to right and up and down to ensure that the full view of what you want is in the frame. Not too much hood, not too much to the right, and not too much to the left. This determines your center because this camera moves around 360 degrees. Every time it’s going to return to this position. I got stuck here for a bit because I had fun rotating the camera left and right back and forth, but the main purpose of this is to calibrate and center your camera.
If you did not install the hardware kit yet for parking surveillance, then you’ll get this warning that those features aren’t available. I will demonstrate those for you later, but it also lets you know what all the voice commands are, and I had a lot of fun using those voice commands.
Inside the settings of the camera itself, you can change a lot of different features, including the resolution and frame rate. You can set it to 60 frames per second or 30 frames per second. You can also turn on or off the HDR. However, HDR is only available at 30 frames per second, not at 60 frames per second, so you have to choose which one you prefer. You can choose the clip duration, if you want the 70mai logo and other information to be embedded into the footage itself, among other things.
You can also select the speed unit if you want kilometers per hour or miles per hour and the date format. This varies depending on which region of the world you’re in. I updated that to my standard date format. Just go through there and figure out which ones you want to change.
I then noticed that there was an update available for the 70mai Omni dash cam, so I initiated that update to the latest firmware. This process was very smooth. I simply downloaded the new firmware. It went extremely quickly to my phone, and then I had to connect back to the camera and push it to the 70mai Omni dash cam.
[Device: Upgrade package received. Start recording a video. Upgrading, do not disconnect from the power source] (camera chimes)
[Device: Upgrading succeeded]
Now it was time to get this dash cam out on the road. It’s actually quite discreet. I was afraid it would be a little clunky there on the windshield, but it didn’t obstruct any of my view and functioned flawlessly right out of the box. As you can see here, these are actual images directly out of the camera itself. They have all these little cute animations when you first start driving. There is a live view video feed on the back of the camera, but once you get driving, it switches to the little cute MaiX animation on the back, probably to not distract the driver from looking at that video feed. But it then switches back to the video feed depending on the voice command you give it or emergency video commands you might issue.
It’s a really sleek-looking camera itself, very sharp from the inside and from the outside. I like how it blends away into the decor of the vehicle itself. Now, here’s a demonstration of the audio quality of the microphones built right into the camera.
This is the audio quality from the 70mai Omni dash cam: “Shoot left. Shoot inside” (camera chimes) “Shoot left.”
Now that we’ve got some money in the bank, let’s look at the visual quality of this camera. The color contrast is really good. This is actually a pretty difficult shot going directly into the sun, so I’m impressed with the HDR quality of this camera. I think they hit a sweet spot by going with just an HD camera instead of a 4K camera because the 4K camera might have messed with the overall low light and HDR qualities.
Now, apart from the windshield being a little dirty, it’s really good visual quality on these recordings at night. As you can see, I’m driving not in a very well-lit downtown area. This is more of a rural area. You’ve got some streetlights at the intersections where there’s a major stoplight, but for the most part, this is driving in very dark settings.
Linus Tech Tips recently did a video showcasing different dash cams, showing how they haven’t really innovated or changed much. He featured the night vision of the cameras and how poor the quality actually was. Based on my experience, this 70mai Omni dash cam steps up to the plate when it comes to the color night vision quality of the recording. Just look at the color contrast and clarity when we’re parking in front of one of our favorite restaurants here in Tucson, at Piazza Gavi.
“Shoot left.”
However, one place I did notice the color clarity and quality suffered is when it pointed to the left or right, and there were no headlights. It’s still good, but as you can see in this selfie photo here, when there are no headlights, you get a fairly noisy selfie. But photos taken straightforward with the headlights are superb, especially with motion.
Overall, I’m having a lot of fun with this camera. It’s awesome having it on the dash, being able to turn it around for a quick fun selfie video or photo. I’m really impressed with this. I’ve used several different dash cams over the years, and this one is user-friendly and very high quality. While I have not actually tested it or experienced it, based on the specs, the collision detection on this is super intelligent, including having five seconds prior to the accident. So it automatically saves five seconds prior to the impact or incident detection and saves that automatically with the incident clip.
When it came to transferring the photos out of the camera itself, it was very simple to do with the app. You simply connect the camera itself. It does stop recording, of course, when you’re connected to it here, but they have a really cool scrubbable timeline that you can just scrub right through to find the actual clips you want. They also have a cool color coding for whether it’s just the general loop recording, emergency recording, parking surveillance, time-lapse recording, or vlog. So you can quickly see visually what type of recording is in the timeline.
It does not have a removable micro SD card but rather just built-in storage. So the 32 gigs built into it is what you’re going to get. If you do the highest quality, it’s going to be about 512 megabytes per minute of recording, which will get you about three hours of constant looping recorded, which I think is sufficient.
“Shoot left.”
It saves individual files for any of the emergency videos or incident recordings, but you can also go through the timeline and choose to save from 10 seconds up to 30 minutes of a certain section from where your cursor is three minutes ahead. You can say, “make me a custom video,” and it will create that and download it directly to your phone. You can also view all the video or photos on the camera based on categories, so you can look up just photographs and then select those photographs and download those individually to your phone if you want to, or go into the videos, whether it’s an emergency video or an event video. You can even overlay some cool graphics with your miles per hour or kilometers per hour and GPS coordinates, and you can select multiple videos or photos at one time to download straight to your mobile device.
This went fairly quickly when downloading, but if you’re transferring a lot of these at the highest resolution, it will take some time. It also has ADAS warning and prompts built right into it, so it can alert you if there is a car in front of you, if there’s a pedestrian, or if you’re departing your lane. There are a lot of cool safety features built right into it. Also, the parking lot surveillance mode will use AI to intelligently detect whether or not a human is too close and start saving that footage as well.
All in all, I would recommend the 70mai dash cam. It again looks really good from the inside and the outside, and it’s just a camera that I’m going to really enjoy having inside our vehicle, not only for safety reasons but just to have it in case of that incident where we need proof of what happened.
Danny
Car accident
Read More: TOP 5 Best Dash Cams of 2024
