KENWOOD Motorsports CAM

Vary poor App Support. Had this camera system on my Harley for a year and half. I could not bring up and veiw the stored videos on my phone. I was told that they are working on an update and it will be out in about four months. A year and a half later I’m still waiting. The only way to view what’s on the card is to remove it and view it on a computer. I still had an issue with that.

I could not be more dissatisfied with this camera system. If I went into every detail that was horrible about this camera system and app, I would be writing for the next hour so I’m going to give you a high level overview. First, the video quality is garbage. Any time I review footage from the cameras on my bike it feels like I’m back in the early 2000s watching cell phone video. Even worse, the system has some kind of gyroscope in it that simply does not work. I’ll be gliding down a smooth, straight road and Kenwood’s image “stabilization” system has the video framing boucing all over the place as if I’m riding off road. It’s absurd to watch. As far as I can work out, it’s not possible to view or download videos over WiFi. Instead, you are forced to remove the micro SD card and plug it into a computer any time you want to view footage. Worst of all, this product does not continually record video! It records 1-minute video clips at seemingly random intervals with 1-3 hour long gaps between each 1-minute video. You have to hope and pray that whatever event you were hoping to catch gets recorded during one of the random 1-minute video recordings that happen every few hours. How did KENWOOD decide to ship this product? This product is not even ready for internal testing, let alone public consumption. In my 30-something years of life, I have never come across an audio video product more poorly built that this system by KENWOOD. I had respect for the company before purchasing this camera system but after this that respect is gone. This app and its associated camera system are complete garbage.

This KENWOOD Motorsport system came with my race car. It’s awful. It did reliably work to capture an incident on track when a competitor hit me due to its internal sensor to capture that. But that’s the limit of reliability so far. When I am on grid I manually push the circular remote button that’s included and installed in my car cockpit. But almost every time it fails to work. Even the 1 minute snapshots it is supposed to continuously record as a dash cam- just in case there is an incident without an impact for the sensor to trigger saving the video- I’ve only gotten 15 second clips. In a settings you can choose 30 second clips or 1 minute clips. I choose 1 minutes. 15 seconds isn’t even an option. This weekend I re-inserted my microSD card after copying the video it had into my desktop computer, and now it records *nothing•! If I had purchased this I would return it. I had been hoping not to have to buy an expensive racing camera system like Smartycam. But I may have no choice as I never heard any complaints about SmartCam failing to record. But I have heard complaints with GoPro and experienced them myself. And this KENWOOD Motorsport system is just terrible. It just seems like it was based on their regular car dash cam system for street cars to record an accident, with no quality control or feature check for Motorsports. And the WiFi based app to get your videos is bonkers confusing and frustrating to use. I’m sorry to say it’s a big failure KENWOOD. Maybe JVC can make a better product for motorsports now that it merged with KENWOOD it appears.

Functions well and does the job