Mio research: perceived and real merits

The company Mio Technology, a leading international developer and manufacturer of automotive electronics reveals a number of tricks that were found during the analysis of the market. Company specialists say that marketing specialists continue to mislead consumers by targeting users with poor technical backgrounds when promoting and describing their products.

At the same time the practice of distortion of facts and indication of incorrect technical characteristics of car DVRs still continues, which has an extremely negative impact on the reputation of the car electronics market as a whole. It should be noted that in recent months, the marketing “arsenal” of unscrupulous manufacturers included new tricks.

The first one is the default setting of the DVR’s true camera resolution. The fact that many manufacturers claim the characteristics of their products with sensors with fewer megapixels than required. This lets them exaggerate such characteristic as recording resolution. The resolution in these cases is achieved by interpolation, stretching the image to the right size.

You can determine the necessary matrix dimensions for the declared resolution with the help of the following table. Mismatched specs would mean that the manufacturer of the device is trying to deceive customers.

The second way to cheat the buyers is to artificially overestimate the resolution of the recording. It can be performed with the help of powerful processors which unscrupulous manufacturers equip their devices with. In this case, the image obtained by the camera is processed and the required number of pixels is added to it. For example, a 2K picture is artificially given a 4K resolution. It should be understood that to create such a quality video device should not only have a powerful processor, but also high quality optics and at least 8-megapixel matrix, the use of which is possible only in very expensive devices.

Fragment of the video in h.264 and mjpeg

The third way is to use the obsolete video coding standard mjpeg, which does not require powerful modern processors. Specifying such a format of video recording in the specifications indicates the use of an outdated low-power processor in the device. In this case the recorded video will contain “artifacts” which will noticeably reduce its quality.

Modern video recorders record video in h.264, which requires a powerful processor but delivers high image quality and requires less storage space in the device to record the file.

“Unfortunately, the promising DVR market continues to attract unscrupulous manufacturers,” emphasizes Alexei Stepanov, Sales Director of Mio Technology in America. – In the vast majority of cases, they do not have their own divisions involved in the research and development of devices. Moreover, as a rule, such “vendors” order large batches of devices from dubious factories. As a result, we end up with products on the market which are obviously not of the right quality. Meanwhile it’s very easy to spot a cheat. We recommend that buyers carefully check not only the general, but also the detailed characteristics of the devices in question. This will help you buy a video recorder, which will meet all expectations and reliably serve for a long time.