Kenwood DRV-N520 Dash Cam Black

Use of this camera with the proper Kenwood head unit produces GREAT results, with the ability to view and control the camera from the head unit. Picture quality is excellent, can read license plates at a fair distance in sunlight and even at night. For the fun of it (NOT recommended) I drove for a very short distance at night, turning my headlights off, and to be honest I could see the road clearer on the head unit than I could through the windshield. Dont try that at home folks.... I upgraded it to a 32gb SD card and it stores plenty of videos. It also records impacts when your car is off and parked. I have captured a couple of incidents with it not involving myself, none severe enough to pull over and provide the video to police. The camera is small and unobtrusive with a long enough cable to easily reach any head unit. I ran the cables under the rubber seal of the windshield completely out of view. 100% recommend this camera if you have the right Kenwood head unit.

Works perfectly with my head unit, clear pictures, easy setup and install and received the item quickly. Only minor annoyance (not worth deducting a star) is that the delay departure warning can get a little bit buggy. Example if you are making a right turn and it doesn't detect cars in front of you because you are waiting for oncoming traffic that is coming that it does see, it will alert you. If using alerts make sure to set them up and adjust the sensitivity. Otherwise, your new 'song' will be beeps and alerts. I use it on a lifted Tacoma, which slightly causes issues with the 'following to close' warning. If it's too much, just turn off the alerts. Overall great product and would purchase again!

The picture is "ok", the size is perfect. I only wish I could get one of these for each of my cars without spending another thousand $ to replace the head units with a Kenwood.There are a few drawbacks:Expensive and only works with Kenwood units, but it makes me wish I could replace all my cars head units with a Kenwood.Every time I hit a bump while driving it beeps to let me know there has been an event and it locks it. I reformat my card every couple of weeks to make sure I don't run out of space.It only takes 32GB cards as a max. How ridiculous.Pros:Its size is perfect. It fits behind my rear view mirror so it does not get in the way of putting up my sun screen when parked.The picture is decent. Not great. Not amazing. Acceptable.The cables are long enough to reach across the windshield, down the A pillars and under the dash to the head unit. Very easy to install on my little Miata.The mount is rock solid. Clean the windshield where it is to be installed and stick it in place. Be careful! Once it is in place, its done.

I put this in my truck after I got rear ended and the lady lied about the incident, so now I have proof if anything happens in the future.I like the quality of the recordings, but I wish it would also record from my rear camera. It has 2 features, one called "delayed departure warning" and "collision warning". The delayed departure warning is supposed to tell you if the car in front is moving forward, or if your car is moving backward. The only time I ever got the warning was when I was at a stop light and I was the first car at the limit line and traffic was passing horizontally across the camera's field of view. The collision warning is a great idea, but it went off all the time. If there was a bend in the road and a car was in the lane next to me, warning. If I was coming to slow traffic, even if i was slowing down to match traffic speed or stopping, warning. If I was driving in and out of shade and sunlight, warning.The audio recording is very weak, I had a conversation while standing just outside the truck with the windows open, the audio was inaudible. Only what is happening in the vehicle is able to be clearly heard.

Overall, I'm more or less pleased because of the integration with my Kenwood car audio unit, but for the money, the camera itself isn't as good as some lower priced, albeit non-kenwood-integrated cameras. The integration is the only reason I purchased this particular unit, and the other features sure have some work to do to keep up with current competitors.Here are my thoughts....Pros:-Its almost un-noticable from the outside, and can definitely be the same from the inside, depending on your chosen mounting location.-Smaller form factor than many dashcams because there is no screen on the camera.-Decent-sized buttons so that you can interact with the camera manually without having to take your eyes off the road.-Integration with Kenwood Excelon head unit. One click of a button, and the dashcam feed is displayed on my radio screen.-You can choose to view, delete, or protect files directly from the radio as well.4 different folders for saving, based on what triggered the recording: continuous (these are loops that get written over when the disc is full), shock parking events (events that occur after you have parked the car that may trigger the camera), manual (if you see something, press the capture button and it will capture a clip to your protected folder), and photographs (you can snap a quick still shot from your camera as well.)embedded GPS and timestamp on all the videosCons:-The installation instructions are terrible. I installed this in about an hour, but could not get my kenwood head unit to recognize it as a dashcam, it only saw it as a forward facing camera, so I had none of the advertised dashcam controls. After about 3 hours of troubleshooting, rewiring, and googling, I found out that when you assign the camera in your kenwood settings, there is a hidden area on the car graphic that you have to press (the hood) to assign it as a dashcam. I, along with hundreds of others online, struggled with this as it looks like you simply assign it to the front bumper location. One small illustration or paragraph in the instruction manual could have saved hundreds of hours for their customers.-The picture quality is so-so for the money. I had a much less expensive dashcam for years that provided a better picture quality because of the lens, but also the mounting location and angle. Most cams place the lens very close to the windshield and parallel to the glass, (if not directly on the windshield.) This camera mounts about an inch away from the windshield which provides a bit of distortion, fuzz in the picture (depending on the cleanliness of your windshield), and just an overall lower quality image.-The included memory card is only 8GB which will fill up quickly depending on your settings.-The software relies on FAT-16 formatting for the storage drive, so a 32GB memory card is all that is supported - no matter what.-The sound that is recorded in the cabin is very low-quality. Again, a much cheaper previous camera I had provided twice the sound quality as this one.-There is no corded transfer of the files. My kenwood unit as two USB ports, and is permanently wired into my car, so why not allow the data to come from the card through those built-in usb ports. Instead, you still have to take the memory card out, and put it in a computer like its 2004 again. The technology exists to allow us to transfer these files via usb to a phone or laptop directly from the head unit.I give it a 3 out of 5 because the integration with my car stereo can't be found anywhere else. If it weren't for that, it would definitely be a 2 out of 5 instead.