Kehan K300 review: Price
Kehan K300 review: Features and design
Open the K300’s box and you’d be forgiven for thinking the wrong product has been sent as, from the rear, this dash cam looks like a small smartphone. It has a 4in screen – much larger than usual – and this means it’s easy to replay recordings and see the menus to change settings. It also means it takes up more space, potentially blocking some of your passenger’s view of the road. Around the front, the big lens protrudes and is wrapped in a reflective chrome-effect plastic that’s very obvious from outside the car. You might choose to remove it from its mount when you park, but the very fact it’s obvious might act as a deterrent to potential car thieves or vandals. Kehan tells us that the next batch of cameras will have a black lens and not the chrome effect. The suction cup works fine, but the plastic mount is flimsy. The dash cam can be removed quickly as it’s only held in by friction, but it would be better to have a release lever and a more sturdy design. A long power adaptor is provided that should be long enough for most cars. It doesn’t offer a USB pass through, so you can’t charge a phone or power a satnav from the same power outlet. There’s precious little mention of the rear camera in the manual. However, despite the red and black power wires which might lead you to think you’ll need professional installation, the camera can take power from the dash cam if you use the cigarette lighter power supply. We installed the K300 in a Vauxhall Meriva and found the wire was more than long enough to mount the camera in the Centre of the rear window. A sticky pad is provided but it lasted less than a day stuck to the car’s headlining: in the end we resorted to the two screws provided. It would have been better to have a bracket designed to stick to the rear window. Another niggle is the 90-degree connector on the end of the wire – a straight connector, like the USB power cable, would have made for a neater installation. Menu options are relatively limited. You can set the length of loop recording as well as whether the g-sensor is turned on or off. There’s also a motion detection mode, intended for parking, but there’s no quick way to enable this short of going through the menus. To use it, we recommend hard-wiring the K300 and using an external battery supply: the camera’s internal battery lasts only a short while. There’s also the option to mute the main unit’s microphone. When plugged in, the rear camera’s feed is displayed at the top right on top of the main camera’s. Pressing the ‘up’ button makes it full screen, which could be handy as a reversing aid.
The image from the rear camera is reversed so you see the same image you do in your rear-view mirror. Again, there’s no option to disable this, and it’s offputting when reviewing the footage as everything is backwards. Kehan has said that the camera will be changed at the end of July 2016 so it won’t be a mirror image. Here’s a screengrab from the video – this is actual size (720×480 pixels). You can’t make out number plates, but it still offers a reasonable record of incidents and should offer the necessary evidence in the event that someone does crash into the back of your car. Separate files are recorded on the microSD card, labeled A for the front and B for the rear camera’s. The time and date (and your registration plate if you want) are embedded on the videos. As there’s no GPS, there’s no speed or location recording. There’s no built-in Wi-Fi either. The buttons are on the right-hand side, but there’s no power button. The camera turns on and off based on whether it has power from your car’s 12V socket, but you can turn still turn it off manually by holding down the OK button.
Kehan K300 review: Quality
The maximum resolution from the front camera is 1920×1080 at 25fps, and files are recorded at 12Mbit/s. Each three-minute recording is almost 300MB, plus over 90MB from the rear camera. That means an 8GB card will record only one hour of video. We recommend opting for a 32GB card to give you the last four hours of your journey. Any videos recorded when the g-sensor is triggered will automatically be locked and not overwritten. Video quality is adequate from the main camera. You can make out number plates, partly thanks to the fact that everything is larger due to the 120-degree lens. Some cameras have 150- or even 170-degree field of view which means cars are much smaller – you have to be very close before you can make out the registration. There’s no stabilisation and the K300’s footage suffers from a lot of video wobble: if you really want better quality, opt for something like the Asus Reco Classic. Here’s a screengrab from the front camera:
At night – well, dusk – it looks more like this:
Again, you have to be close to the vehicle in front to read its numberplate, and the lack of stabilisation means that the plates of parked cars at the edges of the image are unreadable. The rear camera is not that helpful at night as you can’t see a whole lot of detail and certainly no letters or numbers:
