Originally Posted by
PeteHski
I'm simply agreeing with Garmin on the intended "market" for this product.
You keep on acting like this is an either/or proposition. It's not. It's so close to the finish line of being able to do both that it's a shame that no one at Garmin was competent enough to give it a shove across the finish line.
Originally Posted by
PeteHski
I haven't read DCR's review of it yet. I know he was a fan of the standard Varia and, from what you say, it sounds like he was expecting this to be a viable action-cam - which it clearly isn't.
Relevant bits -
Originally Posted by DCRainmaker
The problem here isn’t the addition of features. It’s that none of the features are fully baked.
Stepping back, I don’t really understand how this went so wrong – primarily on the camera side. Let’s take the hardware first. Garmin has extensive experience designing cameras, both action and rearview for vehicles. While Garmin stopped making action cameras a few years back, they were largely competitive hardware-wise to GoPros at the time. Stabilization was acceptable for that timeframe, and that was 5-7 years ago. Whereas this, in 2022, has zero hardware or software stabilization. Nothing. And while that’s perhaps fine (Narrator: It’s not.) for a $100-$200 safety camera, it’s a hard sell for a camera that people might want to use to capture antics on a group ride, or any other moment in cycling.
....
Like anyone else, I wanted this to be awesome, but right now – it’s not. Yes, if I just power on the camera/radar, set it in continuous mode, and wait to get hit from behind – then yes, I’m reasonably confident the camera will have the footage of that incident. But the last time I got hit by a car was 12 years ago this week, and it was from the side (during a race). Thus, any rear-facing camera I buy for $400 needs to at least be capable of capturing non-sad moments on my ride. Because I think capturing those moments is just as important to remembering this sport (still) as fun and viable, as opposed to the assumption that riding on the road is so inherently dangerous that we need to spend $400 in hopes of capturing those sad moments.