Revisiting the Cansonic UltraDuo Z2 (with a crash)
After giving my Cansonic UltraDuo Z2 up for dead I discovered that the SD card, while still functioning, had degraded in performance to significantly slower than the video output required. This was causing the Z2 to reboot over and over again at the end of every video it was attempting to save.
I swapped the SD card out last week and everything’s pretty peachy again with some issues. So without further adieu –
Checking in on the Cansonic UltraDuo Z2 at six months
Even with the rebooting the Cansonic UltraDuo Z2 was recording the videos (minus the 10-15 seconds between each thing for a reboot). I had some pretty interesting video on the other SD card I need to pull. Never having an SD card degrade like that I don’t know who’s to blame, but old SD write speeds had dropped to about 5MBp/s and reads were topping out at 10. Not enough for dual 1080P.
Here’s a wreck this morning
The rear camera captured nothing but a driver looking that way and then slightly moving his car away. Don’t know really what happened with the white van, there was nothing evidently in front of it. Nobody was injured and the police have the video (not joking, I walked down there, crossed 3 lanes of traffic, then showed one of the officers, then emailed him the video).
At six months what’s up with it?
You know I have some problems with it, keeping in mind mine was a pre-production version and these issues may be fixed in the final release or a new firmware. Here they are.
- Battery has either degraded or it’s not charging enough from the car. I can wall charge it, get a full charge, after a couple of weeks the battery indicator says it’s on 1 out of 3 bars. Should be charging off the car battery.
- Rebooting over and over again rather than a useful error message that the SD card is failing to keep up. That was rather useless.
- Time and date was off by 50something minutes. My guess is it’s not counting DST and it lost 10 minutes.
- I cannot see any evidence of the car-keying detection. I can shake this thing and nada. My guess is it requires another sensor attached or updated firmware.
- Suction cup may randomly detach when it’s 120 degrees in the car. That said, no damage noted.
- If it’s below freezing when the Z2 gets power it may think it’s connected to a computer rather than normal power and attempt to connect via USB mode. My guess is the MiniUSB connection they’re using the pins are slightly moved when it’s freezing.
- If you use a power cable that’s not the cigarette lighter one included it will always pop up asking whether you’re connecting via USB.
Is the Cansonic UltraDuo Z2 worth it?
They’re $299 currently. You can prove conclusively whether or not you caused a wreck, and sometimes you can help the police out with a plate number, or in this case a wreck video.
I find sometimes I’ll pull some video and watch just because I was unable to appreciate the scenery at the time because I was driving. So there’s that too.
That said, it’s about $100 more than I’d like it to be priced at at this point but it’s also something that can potentially prove the other driver was terrible.
You can now grab one on Amazon and make us 6% commission or something.
They also make a Uber/Lyft one that grabs more of the interior of the vehicle and less of what’s happening behind the vehicle so make sure you check which version you’re getting. I’ve linked to the one I tested. I don’t see the other one on Amazon at the moment or mention of it.
