This Vantrue X4S Duo 4K dash cam adds to the goodness of that X4 by adding WiFi capability. There are 2.4ghz and 5ghz to choose from. Using the “Vantrue Cam APP”, you can view the dash cam recording in real time, but this distance is limited to 8 meters. If the distance is longer than 8 meters, you may not connect it to the WiFi. You can actually view and download files right onto your phone.
So one of the most popular ones out there is the Vantrue X4, but for 2022 there is a brand new upgraded. A big upgrade of the X4 is the X4S. That's what we have today. We have the duo version, it's the X4S all improved and a dual channel with front and back camera.
The popular X4 had some great features. It was a 4K camera and a 3-inch IPS screen, and it was powered by a supercapacitor. For those that aren't familiar the supercapacitor opposed to a battery is better for extreme temperatures, so for extreme heat and extreme cold, they work better than a battery and are more reliable. That's why so many of the higher-end cameras are going to the supercapacitor.
Vantrue Cam APP
Here it's going to tell what we're going to look for on our mobile device. Once you see it you enter in the password to connect to the APP, which is by default 12345678. With the APP you can control the camera in live view and you can do all those settings in the your phone as well. You can view your footage and download the footage from the APP as well.
The GPS will also show on there. Be aware if you're recording in 4K for the front and 1080 for the back, these file sizes are quite large. Depending on what size of loop you have, a 3 mins loop is about 650MB, which is a lot and close to 1G of information.
The transfer speed is fairly quick but It's still going to take you probably a couple of minutes to download one single clip. So my advice is if you need to do more than one I would actually just take the camera down and just connect it to your computer and leave a supply cable for that.
4K front+1080P rear recording
One of the biggest differences is that this X4S shoots in 4K. so you got 4K in the front and full HD 1080P in the rear at 30fps. It also features wide and high dynamic range (WDR)recording for a real crisp dynamic range recording for a real crisp image.
From the front, you get a f 1.7 very very quick lens. it's a 131°field of view. Same field of view for the rear except that is an f 2.0 aperture. So two fairly quick cameras we're gonna test those out in a little bit.
It gets dark at night time this is a night shot. Here you can see that that real fast f1.7 lens on the front camera really does provide a really decent image in low light.
It's really going to shine really there but I'm driving directly right into the sun. Here just to see how it handles the flares of being backlight completely.
Is this dash cam easy to install?
Along the pillar here, there's wires. There is where I put the rear camera wire. It's all hidden. It's hidden underneath the top trim up, and that trim tool in the box is so easy to slide under there to get that wire installed.
Once you have your suction hooked up you've run your wires. You're going to connect your power up to your 12V source. If you want to use the parking mode, which means that it's going to work when you're not in the vehicle. To let the dash cam run while the car is off, we need to supply the constant power by hardwiring it. Where you're gonna hardwire it directly into your vehicle's fuse panel. Or you use an external battery pack.
I recommend that you hook up your power and your camera first before you mount your rear camera. That way you can see the angle and the location of where you're gonna put that rear camera uh by the way make sure your window is nice and clean. Do not mount in an area where you have a lot of tint. Some windows have a graduated tinted so it's darker on the top mount.
Parking mode
We have three different types of parking modes. Collision detection, motion detection, and low bit-rate recording.
For collision detection, the dash cam will turn off if there is not any movement in front of the camera. When it detects an impact, it will auto turn on and start recording.
We have a motion detection where you know start recording when it detects motion uh from the front or the back camera. Yeah, compare with the other Vantrue dash cam, the rear camera can also detect movement.
And if we select any of these we have low medium or high selections as well. I'm just medium there.
If we hit low bitrate recording, have a choice between 1080 or 720 15fps. This is a low quality recording and so what happens here on this parking mode if we have it set to? There is that it will continuously record at this lower bitrate while car is off.
Format SD card before using
Before using the dash cam, we need to format the SD card to FAT32. There is a format reminder set. It's going to ask to format it once in a while. For example, if you have it set for one month, so after a month there is a message pops up on the screen saying that you should format your card.
And that's good just it just cleans things up. We are using a Vantrue SD card in this camera right now by the way.
I love things that are super simple to use this X4S is so easy right out of the box. It's so easy to navigate. It is not a touch screen, it's a 3” IPS screen. You have 4 buttons on the side and 1 on the top. On the top, you have an M for menu. You have an up arrow a down arrow and an OK button.
Loop recording
Whenever you wanna go back you can also hit M for menu we wanna go down one loop recording. This is how long each clip is going to be before it loops back around and makes a new clip. so you have anywhere from one to five minutes and once your card is full by the way, it will overwrite anything. that's not protected, we'll get to that in a second.
By the way, you can use from 8 to 256GB cards. Make sure to only use the cards that the manufacturer recommends.
G-sensor
All right so we go down to G-sensor. We can forward and backward upward and downward left and rightward depending on where you want to prioritize the G sensor to detect. I left it forward or backward and also you can adjust the sensitivity from 1 to 5. I set it to 3.
Indicator light
Next one here is recording light we can have that on or off you can go in total stealth mode on here. so you won't see any lights at all I like to have it on to make sure that I know that it's recording.
Exposure
So next thing we have exposure. There are a lot of cameras that don't have this option. You can adjust it to be darker(-1, -2) or brighter(+1, +2). Maybe you have a little bit of a tint or even a factory tint on your rear window you might want to increase the exposure up a little bit. And you can go all the way to two full stops which is very bright, we have a pretty clear window. We're just gonna stick to 0.
Color
Some cameras are a little bit too bright or too red you can change it a little bit well basically you can go black or white or sepia. I just go to normal on that
Rotate display
And then next it will be rotate display. If you put it upside down or need to mount it a certain way that it's upside down. You could actually flip it just through here. That's very cool so you have no issue of oh no I put the camera on backwards or upside down. You can just adjust it there.
Time lapse
Next thing a time lapse if you want to just do a time lapse it's kind of cool if you're doing a long road trip or something and you want to just see everything all you know an hour of driving but you can do that about 10 seconds.
Auto LCD off
So this is where you would set how long you want for the LCD to stay on and then it'll go into a black screen. and or you can have it totally off uh for auto off I'm gonna have it off right now if you do have it to turn off and you have the recording light turned off. you are in super stealth mode so you won't even know that you're recording with that. But if you want to maybe you don't want anyone to know you're recording that's what you want to do.
Take a photo
It might not always be something bad or sad that you want to record but hey there's a real cool car there that you want to see. You want to save it well on the top just like a shutter for a camera.
You're just going to hit that and it takes a picture it also you can see the little key. It locks that event as well so not only will you have a locked event of video of what this particular clip is going to be saved in that event folder but you're also going to have a still picture of that as well. So really really handy and extremely easy to use. that's for sure.
System info
This is what you're going to see what model and what software version you're running if you need to update your software.
It's going to update, there are full complete instructions on the Vantrue site.