CarGearBench

We don’t test the gear. We read the people who do — and we show our working.

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Dash cams

The camera that reads a plate at night.

Every dash cam is sold on resolution. A number plate at night is retroreflective — it throws your own headlights straight back into the lens — so the failure at distance is usually overexposure, not a shortage of pixels. The one published test that reports legibility as a distance found a 4K camera that read nothing after dark and a 1440p camera that read a plate at twenty feet. Resolution is the number everyone quotes and the one that decides least.

A small dash camera mounted high on a windscreen at night, seen from inside the car, with oncoming headlights smearing across wet glass.
Illustration, not evidence. The measurements on these pages were taken by MotorTrend, on their cars, under conditions stated on each page.