What is the Halfords HDC400?
The Halfords HDC400 is the flagship of the dashboard range of the company's own brand. There are currently four family members, with prices starting at £ 49.
The HDC400 costs a £ 129 more substantial, but has a resolution of 1440p shot, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi. With the name of Halfords attached, it could be a great success in an increasingly crowded market, although it has been growing massively year after year.
Related: Best Board Cameras
Halfords HDC400 – Trigger Specification
Halfords does not disclose any information about the sensor or processing circuits inside the HDC400. However, both are enough to record 1440p videos, which is the main improvement of this camera control over the smaller members of the range. This equates to a resolution of 2560 x 1440 at 30 fps, and a data rate of 20 Mbit / sec. There are no other resolution options.
A microSD card is not included with this package. If you add a 16 GB module, this will be enough for 106 minutes of footage. However, as with virtually all board cameras, once the medium is full, the recording will be repeated and the oldest files will be overwritten. By default, the HDC400 divides your recording into individual clips lasting three minutes.
It is also possible to shoot still images of 12 megapixels, in case you need to make a record of damages after an accident. However, the HDC400 does not have an LCD panel, so making sure the lens points in the right direction will be somewhat arbitrary unless you use the smartphone application. And if you have your smartphone out, it's probably easier to take some pictures with that.
Halfords HDC400 – Mounting Options
The HDC400 is clearly designed to be a permanent fixture in your car. The mounting system is 3M adhesive only, with no suction alternative. Then, although there is another piece of adhesive material included, this board camera will not be exchanged between the cars on a regular basis.
That said, the HDC400 slips out of its holder. The power connection uses a standard mini-USB port and is integrated into the holder instead of the camera. As such, you do not need to unplug it to remove the camera, which will be useful if you want to use the still image capabilities mentioned above.
However, the connection for the optional HDC-R rear view camera is on the HDC400 itself, so if you add this extra you will need to disconnect the cable whenever you take out the HDC400. The HDC-R seems like a bargain at £ 29, although it registers only 720p, or a quarter of the resolution of the HDC400.
Halfords HDC400 – Settings, menu and Wi-Fi
Without an LCD panel, the HDC400 does not really have a menu. In fact, there is only one button to alternate the power manually, or take a picture, although the camera on the board will turn on and start recording as soon as power is applied. If you want to change any configuration, you must use the built-in Wi-Fi of the HDC400.
This works in conjunction with the MyHDC application for iOS or Android. Once you have logged in to the Wi-Fi hotspot of the HDC400 and activated the application, it allows you to toggle the recording and switch to photo mode. There are some settings available, such as changing the resolution of the photo between high, medium and low, or altering the duration of the loop recording to five minutes of three, or deactivating it completely.
Halfords HDC400 – GPS and additional features [19659002] The HDC400 also includes a built-in GPS receiver, so it captures its location along with the footage. From the MyHDC application interface, you can choose to mark your location in the video. You can add a watermark to the video, toggle the audio and change the G-Sensor between low, medium, high and off.
This sensor controls when the HDC400 detects an incident and prevents the current file from being overwritten. There is also a parking mode, where the board camera will capture footage if it detects an impact when stopped. This could be useful to monitor your vehicle when you leave it outside a store.
However, there is no other advanced feature of the control camera that is offered here. It is surprising that GPS has not been used to provide location warnings for the speed camera. The lack of extras such as lane departure warnings and collision detection is a minor loss.
Halfords HDC400 – Image Quality
The HDC400 has a wide field of view of 180 degrees, which means that its footage is somewhat distorted edges. However, with its resolution of 1440p there are many details. There are some obvious effects of compression because the data rate is a bit low for this resolution.
The good news is that this does not prevent the text, such as license plates, from being readable. The HDC400 handles the contrast reasonably well, considering it was testing on a fairly sunny day, although the bright sky led to the slightly underexposed mainframe area. However, the colors are mostly accurate. In general, the image quality is acceptable for the intended task.
Why buy the Halfords HDC400?
The Halfords HDC400 is a decent control camera, although not exceptional. The video benefits from the resolution of 1440p and this dash camera is quite discreet; You can sit on top of your windshield and it almost looks like it came with the car.
The price of £ 129 is quite reasonable for this resolution in a camera with GPS and built-in Wi-Fi. The HDC400 may not be the feature-rich dash camera for the price, but it does the basic recording work very well.
Verdict
The HDC400 from Halfords offers you decent video quality of 1440p dash cam, in a discreet design.