Miofive’s Discreet Two-Camera Dashcam System Enables More Focus On Safe Driving

Dash camera tech continues to evolve, and I’m always on the lookout for the next best way to capture the road chaos that goes on around us on a daily basis. I recently bought a new car so it was time to add in a dashcam to keep track of those crazies in other cars – and keep tabs on a newly licensed teenage driver of my own.

Fortunately, he’s a good driver (so far), but the reasons to put a dash camera in your vehicle remain the same, teenager or no: If things go sideways, it’s best to have it on video. Even better: Having video from not one but two cameras. That’s just one key feature of the $249 Miofive 4K setup I installed.

The main dash camera, a slim, discreet device with a widescreen touchscreen display and 4K (3840×2160) f1.8 camera with a 140-degree field of view looking forward, connects to a 2K (1440HD) camera on a long tether to look out the back of the car – or wherever you point it, since it can rotate 180 degrees in its mount to also record the inside of your vehicle.

Both cameras record at once to the high-speed internal 128gb memory. There are no removable SD cards to buy, lose or keep track of. The Miofive records “loops” like all dash cameras, of course, so old clips are erased if they are not locked to make space for recording new ones. To view a clip, simply tap the touchscreen or connect your phone to the Miofive’s 5G-speed wifi and open the simple app and download them.

The system will also auto-connect and notify you if a clip locks. Clips can be locked manually with a button on the camera or in the app, and impacts to the vehicle will automatically lock a clip – all pretty much standard dashcam fare. The clip locking sensitivity is also settable.

Even if you don’t connect to the Miofive’s app, the system will still auto-boot and begin recording when you start your vehicle and dutifully records while the vehicle is driven. If the camera is hard-wired to the car’s 12-volt battery, it will also monitor the car while it is parked. Once the Miofive comes back into wifi range, clips are automatically added to the user’s phone, if that option is selected in the app. The camera also updates its firmware and so forth via a home wifi link.

Video from the Miofive’s cameras is crisp and clear, including at night, although the front-facing 4K camera outperforms the 2K remote module, which is to be expected. Still, just “good” video at night is a whole lot better than none. In daylight, both cameras perform well and quickly adapt to changes in light levels. Miofive has added as assistant AI (their term) that can also alert drivers when a vehicle ahead moves and motion sensors also provide tracking of aggressive vehicle dynamics, which is a fancy way of saying it monitors how my teenager is driving, not just where he’s driving. To that end, the built-in GPS also creates a drive track that shows up in the app, complete with speed annotation and other data points. Watch those cornering speeds, son, it’s a Subaru, not a Stingray.

Two things I love about the Miofive: the slim, wide-screen form factor allows it to be tucked up and out of the way on the windshield, and the widescreen format display, while only 2.2 inches, is an actual touchscreen with a decent UI that makes it easy to play back clips on the display and run the camera without the app being open. The screen icons are small, so it’s easy to fat-finger the UI, but it’s still far better than having to do a button dance like I’m programming a VCR in 1986. And including 128gb of memory in the camera itself simplifies operation. A single-camera, 64gb version is also available.

At $250, the Miofive 4K isn’t cheap (for a dash cam), but those key attributes help me feel much better about the price. And if the camera captures a collision or other incident where you’re in the right, it can pay for itself many times over in legal costs and time saved. Highly recommended.