70mai T800 dashcam review: triple-channel 4K recording, smart features and parking mode

There's a real arms race developing in the world of premium, high-end dashcams. And, while it's quite alarming that it's not hard to spend upwards of £400 on a dashcam, the tech we're starting to see come out of this battle for supremacy is mind-blowing.

The latest company to hurl its hat into the ring is 70mai, one of the biggest innovators in the smart dashcam sector. Its latest flagship product is the T800, and I've been testing one for several weeks.

It currently costs £316.99, and that's only if you can catch a voucher deal on Amazon, saving you 30% off the standard £449.99 price. It does, however, have just about everything you'd want from a £300 dashcam. In fact, it has all the features you could ever need from a dashcam, short of some sort of high-energy laser weapon for middle-lane hoggers. One day perhaps.

This, quite impressively, is the first three-channel dashcam to have two 4K sensors, one facing the front, and the other facing the rear. It has a third channel, monitoring the car's interior, which is a less impressive 1080P HD sensor, but HDR recording is enabled across all three channels. And that makes a huge difference to light and colour balance.

Both the front and rear cameras harness the power of Sony's latest Starvis 2 IMX678 technology, which puts the T800 ahead of plenty of competitors, and the combination of such powerful front and rear image capture technology is handled by some truly beefy processing power in the main unit.

Meanwhile, the night mode is also seriously impressive, because there's a suite of four infrared lights in the interior light, which bathe the car's cabin in invisible light, and the main cameras have a "Night Owl" system that does a great job of reducing glare.

The benefits of having 4K footage only become apparent if you need to use the dashcam for its intended purpose. And although you hope you'll never need it to record an incident in your car, when it comes to picking out fine details at a distance, like registration numbers, for example, the more resolution, the merrier.

But it's not as if the T800 is a one-trick pony. As with most flagship smart dashcams, it also has a clever parking mode. This is only available if you hardwire the dashcam using a kit that you have to buy separately, but it unlocks features like collision detection, time-lapse recording, and even Al motion detection.

It means you essentially have a 24/7 CCTV system inside and outside your car, and all the footage is beamed back to your smartphone through the 4G WiFi6 system and the 70mai app.

Of course, the footage from all three cameras is stored, and it uses a microSD card system to capture up to 512GB at a time. Handily, the card comes free with the dashcam, which is a nice touch.

This large capacity is crucial with dual 4K footage, but it also allows for a longer recording time. The T800 can automatically pre-record up to three minutes before a detected impact, and up to 30 seconds after. That's pretty much market-leading.

There's also a suite of driver assistance tech, but most of us will turn these off. I've never tested one that works well in a dashcam, and the T800 certainly hasn't broken the mould.

It's very easy to use, though. It's less easy to install, but only because there's wiring and potentially a hard-wire kit to get your head around, and it's no harder than any other dashcam.

The only other issue I had also isn't unique to 70mai, and that's repositioning the interior camera. Tall drivers will need it at a different angle to short drivers. It's literally a twist away from lining it up correctly, but something to remember if you share your car a lot.

Overall, there's so little to dislike about the 70mai T800. Yes, it's expensive, but this is the top tier of dashcams and, in reality, it's no more pricey than some of its equally specced rivals.

It comes down to how much you value image quality. While 4K is impressive and can give you an edge when deciphering grainy footage, 2K or HD isn't bad.

This isn't innovation for innovation's sake, though, all the flagships will adopt this tech soon. 70mai just got there first. And the result is seriously good.