Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80

Some three years after we reported on this little design hitting Kickstarter, we finally have one in to review. The Tooo Cycling DVR80 is a pretty interesting product that I'm sure will find a market: it's hugely made to a price, and aiming at the bottom/entry point of the bike camera market. To some that will mean too little quality and too few features, while others will be delighted that finally a decent light and rear-facing camera combination is available at this price point.

I've been wearing a Hövding (the airbag helmet) for the last six years, from a company that no longer exists. I love it. It beeps reassuringly when I put it on, but beyond that I have absolutely no idea if it actually works, and of course, I hope I never have to find out. There's potentially some irony to the fact that, having never seen it work, perhaps it won't when I need it to. Which means It's simultaneously working perfectly, but could equally be completely broken. This is the Schrödinger's cat of bicycle helmet superpositions. (A sentence which surely has never been typed before). This camera is a little like that. Let me tell you why.

It's a 90g, 80-lumen rear light and camera, and there's plenty to like. For a start, the rear light is great. It's clear, piercing, has a decent width of visibility, and the battery last ages, a claimed nine hours or so, though brand new and fully charged I think I got closer to seven and a half, though there are enough variable parameters, like frame-rates, that I didn't feel this was an unreasonable claim.

> Buyer’s Guide: Best rear bike lights

There are four modes to the light: off, steady, and two different speeds of flashing. The clamp that holds it to the saddle is simple, light and effective. It takes two rubber o-rings to secure the light bracket to your seatpost, but comes with four small and two larger ones for more girthy posts, and an adaptor for aero seat tubes/posts. It fit my standard round post well, and gripped well for the entire test period, and as far as I can see didn't slip.

Locking the light into the bracket is a little bit fiddly, especially as the plastic retaining clip is new and stiff, though I imagine this will bed in a bit. I have to say I found it slightly easier to just pull the entire unit and bracket off by unclipping the rubber o-rings rather than extracting the unit from the bracket. That said, with gloves on, the opposite was true.

If you have a very short length of seatpost protruding from your seat tube (less than 10cm perhaps) you may find it challenging to slide the light onto the rails of the mounting bracket, as there might not be enough room, but this is the only problem I can foresee.

In use

In use, the camera and light were great. You simply push the button once to turn it on, and it'll buzz/vibrate to let you know it's alive, and a blue tally-lamp blinks to confirm recording is active. Go on your way. When you're finished your ride, a longer press turns everything off.

One of the better experiences is the auto-looping function of the camera. It'll take Micro SD cards up to 128GB, and records footage in three-minute chunks until the card is full, and then begins overwriting the oldest files. I seemed to get about 12 minutes of recording time per GB of data, which means that a 128GB card, available for about £10 these days, would give you about 25 hours of recording before it stared looping the recordings. Plenty, I'd say.

It feels well made, no rattles or shakes. It's sturdy and solid, though not heavy. The silicone covers for the USB port and SD card slot are satisfactory, and though the tiny strands of silicone that hold them onto the unit look like they might give way at any moment and break, as they are very fine, they didn't in my testing.

Video quality

So that leaves one final element: what's the video quality like? The video quality is 1080p at 30 or 60 frames per second. The quality is enough to make out number plates if they're pretty close to you, within 30 feet or so, but you absolutely must use the higher frame rate. However, there's quite a lot of barrel distortion on the lens; it's the same effect as looking through the peep-hole of a door, though of course not so pronounced. It distorts the image, particularly at the edges (observe buildings on the sides of the street seeming to warp and stretch as you pass).

The effect isn't too bad if riding in a straight line on even terrain. It gets rather unpleasant to watch as you turn, though, as all the elements in the picture pass through the distortion, and this effect is compounded by the lack of stabilisation in the camera.

Furthermore, the lens and sensor don't seem to have a ton of dynamic range (the difference in the lightest and darkest points in an image). In footage, you can see the clouds just look bright white, without any texture or detail to them; the highlights are blown out. (This means the camera can't read the detail and just registers it all as white.) In bright daylight, the camera can struggle to resolve details in the brightest parts of the shot, and struggles in the darker parts too.

Additionally, I found it had trouble reading number plates if the angle to the camera caused reflective glare. Premium modern cameras have coatings on the lens to minimise this, which act a little like a polariser, limiting glare and allowing you to see the detail under the reflected light. This may be something the Tooo Cycling camera is doing without. This lens was not great with glare like that reflected off windows and number plates.

> Everything you need to know about bike cameras

One of the first videos I watched back was a two-minute clip on a twisty section of poorly surfaced road, and to be frank, it made me rather nauseated. Some people can handle VR racing simulators and some can't. I confess I'm in the latter camp. Two minutes of watching this backwards-facing video, with bad barrel distortion, over a twisty, poorly surfaced road was quite enough for me, and I genuinely felt a little nausea. (To be fair, this isn't a camera made for 'reviewing footage of happy memories... So it's not as if you're going to gather around with loved ones and view a highlight reel.)

I reviewed the DJI Osmo Action 4 last year, and loved that footage. It's crystal clear from a massive sensor, and very well stabilised. It's 4k, so four times the resolution of 1080p, so in a way this is a deeply unfair comparison, plus the Osmo is twice as expensive, doesn't include a bike light, and is designed solely to capture sharp, stable footage, with a battery life of about 90 minutes. That being said, it's evidence of how we've been spoiled by terrific video quality. GoPro brought 4k footage to the Hero4 over 10 years ago, and even a six-year-old iPhone can do great stabilised 4k.

Hence my Hövding helmet analogy. You're (hopefully) never going to watch the footage; in a way, you hope you never have to find out if it worked or not. There are limitations to this camera. Off-centre images are hard to see, and cars have to be close for their number plates to be visible. The other side of the coin, however, is that if there is an incident, unfortunately cars will probably will be close to the camera. We're obviously not reviewing footage for enjoyment, we're reviewing to see broad brushstrokes things... was the car in the right place? was it the right side of the line? did it go through a red light? did it brake too late...? All these things we'd scan the footage for are probably easily captured.

Value

There's no way to think about this camera divorced from its price. It's made to hit a budget, the very entry point to combined cameras and lights, and it does that well. At retail it's £149.99, though it can be had for as little as £115.

Its obvious competition is the Cycliq range of cameras. The Fly6 Pro that Emily reviewed is two and a bit times the price at retail – £347.98 – and has 4k and Wi-Fi for transfers. Cycliq also has a nice range of companion apps for its family of computers whereas this has nothing.

It's also up against Garmin's mighty Varia line. I haven't used one, but on paper the Garmin outstrips the Tooo Cycling HDR80. As it should for double the price. There are a few flavours of the Varia, but the one that's a light and a camera and a radar, the RCT715, which Mike reviewed last year, also has Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth and ANT+, and comes with a 16GB card and a higher waterproof rating (IPX7). That said, Mike didn't think much to its 1080p camera either...

Neil did rather like the Techalogic CR-1, though, which is an even cheaper offering at £104.95 (and currently £99.95).

Conclusion

The HDR80 is far from a perfect camera, but it must be said, it's not terrible value for money. It's a reasonable image wrapped up in an easy-to-use package. One button on and off, forget about the recordings until you need them, and hopefully you never will.

If it were my money, I'd save it and probably get a Cycliq or maybe a Garmin, but that's also distinctly my buying MO: save up and get something really good. For those less ridiculous than me, there's no denying the Tooo Cycling comes in at a price: the light is great, and it's a 50g and perhaps £75 premium over 'just a light' that will probably capture good enough footage in the unhappy event that you need it.

Verdict

Inexpensive and easy-to-use camera with average, if lacklustre quality, but with a really good light and decent battery life