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This camera could save you from a ton of auto insurance pain

This camera could save you from a ton of auto insurance pain

The CDR 855 BT is a small and lightweight camera with nice fit and finish.

It comes with an easy-to-use quick-detach suction cup mount. It's nice and reduces road vibration well, but I found that if you accidentally tap it, the mount easily changes position. Though slightly annoying, it wasn't a deal breaker.

The camera came with an 8GB memory card. The card was good to hold about 90 minutes of 1080P, 30 FPS video with audio recording turned off. When the card fills up, the oldest file gets deleted to make space for the new ones.

The main control buttons are below the screen and are just big enough to use comfortably. The blue button above the screen is for emergency recording purposes. Any clips recorded by pressing that button get saved and will not be overwritten by other files, the same goes for clips are being recorded when the camera senses a massive change in G forces that could indicate an accident.

USB and HDMI ports are on the right of the camera, and the power button is on the top right.

I stuffed the dash cam right behind my rearview mirror. It never got in the way.

Though to be fair, I'm not really one that's easily distracted by windshield-mounted objects.

If anything, it was the super long USB charging cable that the dash cam came with that got kind of annoying.

If you're going to leave one of these in your car, I'd highly recommend hardwiring it or hiding the cable inside your headliner so it's not dangling everywhere.

Even with the screen on, the camera isn't a distraction while driving around at night. If you want, the screen can be turned off by pressing just one button.

The CDR 855 BT has features that, when connected to your smartphone or other Bluetooth-capable Cobra device, can notify the driver of red light cameras and speed traps ahead.

To test this feature, I connected my iPhone to the dash cam and downloaded the Cobra iRadar app.

The app is very much like Waze.

Users can report on-road hazards and speeding traps, but the big difference here is that when I played around with the app, I could barely find any road reports.

Now if the dash cam could connect directly to Waze, instead of an app that pretends to be Waze and that it seems like no one really uses, that'd be a massive game changer.

Either way, it's a cool idea, and if you are able to connect it to a Cobra radar detector, the feature is probably a lot more useful.