Rearview mirror with camera and LED display

New in-car camera/rearview mirror from Hamwha...



It looks more or less like a normal rearview mirror but has an internal camera pointing forward to record what’s happening in front of your vehicle.

Unlike other in-car recorders that you attach to the windshield, the advantage of this rearview mirror is that it doesn’t obstruct your view. It activates automatically when you turn on the engine, and automatically starts overwriting the old footage in a continuous loop so that you don’t have to worry about replacing the storage media when it’s full and missing out on something.


http://www.japantoday.com/category/new-products/view/rearview-mirror-with-camera-and-led-display


The right side of the mirror consists of a LCD display that can show what’s being recorded currently or play back what’s already been recorded. To make it even more nifty (and practical), the device includes a GPS and accelerometer, so that along with your video footage, data on your location and motion also gets recorded.


A 2 GB SD card should record about 130 minutes of video, and power is supplied from your car’s cigarette lighter.


According to the Umazon product page, video by this camera is recorded at 25 frames per second and is 640 by 480 resolution.
This recorder/mirror is available only through Hamwha’s online store, Umazone (the model number is UMA-RMDR02), and costs 14,900 yen.

 

Interesting idea. Not exactly new tech though. I had one with an LCD screen in the exact same spot that I hooked up a small camera to help me when backing up into spots... that was back in 2002. Only diff is that I didn't record anything.