Canyon DVR40GPS dashcam: Camera quality is the star of the show – but don’t forget to buy a good memory card

Dashcams can be useful things to have in your car these days. In my own immediate social circle, they have been used at least twice to back up an account of an incident with an insurance company, a situation that would have been hard to prove otherwise. And on another occasion, a dashcam would have prevented a hefty repair bill.

But if they are going to be of any use, they need to be simple to set up and use, and give actual usable footage, or else they will end up like every other piece of overly complex technology: gathering dust as a rather expensive paperweight in your car.

The Canyon DVR40GPS dashcam fulfils all those requirements. The video it produces is high quality, even when driving on bumpier roads, and setting it up takes only a few minutes.

In the box you get the dashcam, car power adaptor and a 3.6m USB-C cable that should suit most vehicles. Like many dashcams, it needs a constant power source, so that will be either the 12V plug or hardwiring it into the car itself. The easiest option out of the box is the 12V plug, and with the tools in the box you can tuck the trailing cables away.

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A word of warning: make sure you have a compatible micro SD card for the camera. It needs to be a high-quality one, and there is none in the box. No internal memory means that, without the card, the camera will do very little.

Installing it in the car is simple. To fix it to the windscreen, you can use the magnetic mount – a strong one at that – with a suction cup. Once properly fitted, there is no shifting the camera; the last thing you want is the camera dropping off the windscreen. When it is done well, I prefer this type of mount, as I have fitted the 3M sticky pads for other dashcams, only to discover 10 minutes or so later that the position needs to be adjusted. It’s not an easy task. There are extra sticky bits in the box, but I did not require them for this review.

If the camera detects a jolt that indicates an impact of any kind, it will lock the clip to stop it from being overwritten on the rest of your journey

The camera looks like a standard dashcam: unobtrusive, with a decent-sized touchscreen on the back. You can use that as a live view as you drive – though for obvious reasons, your attention should be on the road and not on the camera. You can also use it to display information such as speed and so on, thanks to the GPS module that tracks location and speed, giving you extra information should you need it. The speed comes up in large digits on the touchscreen, so you can stay the right side of local traffic laws without having to peer at a small screen.

But that’s an extra. The star of the show here is the camera quality. With a 140-degree field of vision, the camera captures a lot, and deals well with a variety of lighting conditions. It uses Sony’s Starvis 415 low-light image sensor, and includes a circular polariser filter on the lens to minimise reflections. It works; combined with the 4K capabilities, the dashcam footage is clear and detailed.

It’s the kind of thing you won’t think about until you need it. Should the worst happen, the Canyon camera will automatically save your footage. If the camera detects a jolt that indicates an impact of any kind, it will lock the clip to stop it from being overwritten on the rest of your journey. This can sometimes happen when the road is particularly bad: if the car hits a pothole, for example.

You can access all this footage via the camera’s wifi connection and the app, which allows you to control some of the camera’s basic functions and settings. You can view and download video clips, see the locked clips on the card and play about with some settings. The app also allows you to see a live view of the camera feed, too, complete with time stamps.

Transferring the videos is not difficult, although at times the wifi connection can be temperamental. It took a couple of tries to connect it the second time, and I had to clear the wifi settings on my phone and reconnect.

Good

The camera has a decent field of view, at 140 degrees, and the footage is high quality when transferred off the card. The touchscreen on the device is responsive, too, although the default sound settings include some rather loud bleeps for every press.

Bad

There is no internal memory, so you will need a memory card for this dashcam. Make sure to buy one with a decent storage capacity. The 4K footage from the camera will eat up the storage on a smaller Micro SD card quite quickly.

Everything else

The GPS module comes in handy should you ever need to produce the footage for an incident. It also means you could have access to fixed speed camera locations, depending on where you are driving. You can get audible warnings, too.

Verdict

A decent dashcam with good video footage, and one that will require little intervention to keep it working. Just get a good memory card from the start.