BlackVue Power Magic Pro

It works, but shouldn't have the word "Pro" anywhere in the title – It works well, but the build quality is horrible. The cables feel like they'll pull straight out very easily and the switches feel cheap and have a lot of play.

Returned Twice – At the start this worked great. All of a sudden it stopped working so I returned it for another and now the new one doesn’t work. I’ve used a tester to check that it’s wired fine and it is.

Useful... until they both fail [Edited - great customer service saves the day] – [Edit: Auto BlackBox are the Australian distributor for the BlackVue product range and they have been excellent in their handling of the problems I've reported. I provided my faulty camera and the two Power Magic Pro units to them for investigation. They have replaced the camera under warranty for the timing and SD card issues and, despite being unable to confirm the faults reported, have replaced the PMP units as well. In this day and age, customer service of this standard is a rarity and should not be overlooked by customers looking for a quality dash-cam.

It should be noted that, since we replaced one of the PMP units ourselves, we had a spare and this worked perfectly well with an alternative dash-cam we had bought for a third car, it is not just limited to BlackVue units.]

Original Review Text (retained for clarity): We have two cars, each of which is fitted with a Blackvue DR650S 2CH (front and rear) dash camera. The cameras are good (though the Android app is a bit average and the firmware updating can be a pain) but they stop recording as soon as the car is turned off, which is not be ideal when you want to see who damaged the car in a car park or the like.

I fitted both cars with a Blackvue Power Magic Pro (bought together or very close) - this provides permanent power to the camera until either the configured time expires (6/12/24hr) or the voltage of the car battery drops below a preset level (12V/12.5V). With the cameras configured to switch to parking mode, this allows the camera to monitor movement around the car when unattended. In addition it reduces the occasions where the device has to re-acquire the satellite lock to set the time accurately on power-up.

This is all well and good, until both devices failed within a week of each other! Both devices decided not to cut out at the preset voltage and we came back to cars with dead batteries. Thank goodness for the RAC! In one case the car's battery was only a year old and didn't suffer damage from this happening three times in a week (before I identified the fault and disabled the device). In this case it was a simple case of switching off the device so that it just passed through the normal car power.

On the other car the battery had to be replaced, fortunately it was just on the end of its warranty and the RAC replaced it at no cost. On this device, however, I had to remove the device entirely as switching it off made no difference and it just drained the power again.

So, while the dash cams are pretty good, the manufacturing quality of the equipment leaves something to be desired. Under the circumstances, I shall be packing both failed units up and sending them to the manufacturer to see if they can identify the problem as this would suggest a bad batch. They are out of warranty and I doubt I have the receipts any more but I don't want to just dump them.