Dashcam Comparison: Kent CamEye vs Transcend DrivePro 220

While one camera suits individual drivers who want great footage, the other acts as a smart surveillance device.

These dashcams suit different purposes. 

Photo: The Quint

With increasing security concerns and untoward incidents taking place on the road, what you need is a dash camera. Here we compared two dash cameras – the Kent CamEye priced at Rs 17,999. This is not just a dash camera, it is a connected dash camera, which has a SIM in it and can be remotely monitored by an app.

The other is a traditional dash camera, which is the Transcend DrivePro 220, that is priced at around Rs 12,000. It has since been upgraded to the Transcend DrivePro 230 at the same price point.

The Kent CamEye comes with an annual subscription for its connectivity option. You have to pay about Rs 7,200 a year and that includes charges for the cloud storage, tracking and monitoring that is done. With the Transcend DrivePro 220, it’s a one-time cost and the additional cost of an SD card. But it has no remote connectivity options.

There is no inbuilt storage in the Kent CamEye. Everything is stored on the cloud. The Kent CamEye is useful if you have a driver in the car because it has two cameras – one in the front and one at the rear which monitor what’s happening in front of the car as well as inside the car. You can remotely monitor it from your app.

You can even call and speak to the driver in the car. It is a two-way device. It also gives you alerts if the camera is removed, if the power is removed, if the car is overspeeding or it gets out of a set geo-fenced area. It is a very useful tool to have if security is your primary concern.

The Kent CamEye and the Transcend DP220 have in-built GPS. The Transcend DP220 only shows you the location of a video at any point of time. However, the Kent CamEye allows you to remotely track the location of the car in real-time and even view footage in stealth mode via the app.

The Kent CamEye has a lot of interesting functions in it because it combines the best parts of a GPS tracker as well as a dash camera. The only thing that’s not aesthetic is the form factor – it’s rather big and bulky.

The other issue is the video quality. The Kent CamEye plays jittery video because it records only once every 5 seconds and plays back from the cloud server. The Transcend DrivePro records good quality 1080 HD video. Here again, it depends on what you want the device for - video or real-time surveillance.

The Transcend DP220 is a fairly loaded camera it has things like collision warning, overspeed alerts and lane departure warnings all built into the camera. So for an individual driver, this is a good driving assist tool.

So, to sum up, if you have a driver and security is your primary concern, then the Kent CamEye is what you should probably be looking at. And if you want to only take pictures and videos of your road trips then a regular dash camera like the Transcend DP220 would be enough for you.