The X-eye is not a commonly new idea but its size and video resolution are actually. This little black box is about 3 inches tall and 2 inches wide and ¾ inch thick. It has a small round base with 3M tape on it to affix it to a car windshield. The color camera is 2 mega-pixels but the video is compressed to a recorded resolution of 720x480 at 13.5 fps, and has about a 90 degree field of view horizontally and 66 degrees vertically and handles low light surprisingly well. The audio pickup is quite good and clear, clear enough to hear the radio while turned to an acceptable level.

The operation of the unit was not at all difficult; a simple on/off switch on the back and recording is done on a micro SD card. Now the unit does have to be plugged in for power, it only has a short back up battery that is able to save a file before it loses power such as turning off the car engine.

It comes with a cigarette light adapter and about 6 feet of cable so you can run it along the interior windshield and across the dash or the door. The stability of the recording was remarkable, since it does continuous recording the unit has an X/Y/Z axis sensor. The recordings are broken down into separate folders. When either axis plane is broken too abruptly it creates a 20 second clip of the event and puts the video in an event folder. The other folder is the normal folder which contains all the video. It is broken down into video segments up to 2 minutes long all depending upon at what point in the 2 minute segment that the X/Y/Z axis was broken. Once any axis is broken, a new clip is made and a 20 second event segment is created, 10 seconds before the event and 10 seconds after. This feature seems handy for seeing quick stops (Z axis) or sharp turns (X/Y axis) but overall the video was amazingly steady.

This little device does come with software on the 2GB SD card that was provided, which has VLC media player on it since the files don’t seem to play in windows media or Nero. Each gig will hold about 3 hrs of video before it will record over itself and can recognize up to a 16GB card. The time and date can be set in the unit and there is a video out plug but there is no accessory video out cable that comes with it. Essentially is seems the video out was to be able to see live video for setting it up but with the broad field of view, it really didn’t seem necessary.

Overall this miniature all in one camera and recorder is a very handy device. Great for general driving around the city for insurance purposes or a simple country drive to record nature and all its wonder.

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