How we compare

There is no test lab and no staff

Nobody here has driven these cameras. This site is a reference, not a review operation: we read manufacturers’ published specifications, record them in one structured file, compute three figures from them that the manufacturers do not publish, and summarise what owners report. Where a page makes a recommendation it names the checkable basis for it — a specification and an ordering — rather than attributing it to a person who does not exist.

Where the specifications come from

Every figure was read off a manufacturer’s own product page where one exists, and off a specialist retailer’s spec table where it does not. Each camera records the pages it was read from. Where two sources disagreed we took the manufacturer’s figure; where nobody publishes a figure the field is left empty and the site hides the row rather than guessing. All 53 entries were recorded on 2026-09-23.

12 of the cameras here do not publish an image sensor part number and 9 publish no operating-temperature range. Those gaps are visible on the pages rather than filled in, because the absence is itself information about the manufacturer.

The three figures we compute

Everything else on this site is a published specification. These three are ours, and they are marked with a green dot wherever they appear so you can always tell which is which.

• Pixels per degree is horizontal recording pixels divided by the published field of view. Manufacturers publish a diagonal angle almost universally, so this is a comparison index rather than an optical measurement — conservative by roughly the same amount for every camera, which is what makes the ranking hold. The full explanation.
• The hot-car flag is simply whether the camera uses a supercapacitor rather than a lithium cell, shown with the published temperature range beside it. 46 of 53 cameras here use a supercapacitor.
• The parking tier is derived from which parking modes a camera supports and whether a hardwire path exists — because “has parking mode” is on every box and describes at least four different behaviours.

Why no camera here shows a star rating

Because we do not have any we can stand behind. An aggregate rating is a claim about what real owners think, and inventing one — or quietly reprinting a retailer’s — is the most common dishonest thing a comparison site does. Our code gates every star on a cited, non-Amazon source. Nothing currently clears that gate, so no stars render anywhere and no rating markup goes into our structured data. Sorting falls back to specifications we actually recorded.

Where the owner sentiment comes from

The “what owners say” sections summarise public owner discussion that we read, from a local archive of several years of it. We write that section only for cameras where there is enough discussion to summarise honestly — currently 37 of 53 cameras. The other 16 say so plainly on their own pages rather than showing an empty heading or a plausible-sounding paragraph.

Where a camera’s own description and pros and cons were written from specifications rather than from owner reports — which is currently all of them — the page says so. We do not put “owners report” in front of something nobody reported.

How the lists are ordered

They are not opinions. Every shortlist on this site is a filter plus a sort over the same catalog file, and each one states the specification it is ordered by, so a list cannot contain a camera we have not recorded. There are 8 shortlists; one that would qualify fewer than 3 cameras is not published at all rather than shipped short. Brand and type hubs need at least 2 cameras for the same reason.

The 69 head-to-head pages are curated rather than generated: each camera against its nearest-priced sibling from the same brand and its nearest-priced rival of the same type. There are 1,378 possible pairings of 53 cameras, and publishing all of them would be 1,378 near-identical pages.

Prices

Every price on this site is an approximate snapshot from 2026-09-23, written with a tilde and labelled as approximate everywhere it appears. Dash cam street prices move constantly and bundle deals move them further. Treat them as a tier rather than a quote.

What we never do

• Link to a retailer. There is not a single buy button, affiliate link or “check price” on this site, and nothing here earns a commission.
• Take money for placement. Nobody can buy a position in a list here.
• Write owner sentiment for a camera whose owners we have not read.
• Print a rating, a review count or a specification we cannot source.
• Publish a comparison page for a pairing nobody would actually cross-shop.
• Generate a number describing something we did not count.

How this site makes money

It does not. There are no retailer links, no affiliate programme and no advertising. If that changes, this page changes first and says so.

Corrections

Specifications drift — manufacturers change sensors mid-production without changing model numbers, and revise firmware behaviour after launch. If a figure here no longer matches the manufacturer’s page, that is a bug and we want to know: chelsea@hagadornwebdev.com.