SomeStupidDriver
Well-known member
- Thread starter
- #1
I was sent the REDTIGER F17 Elite in exchange for my honest review, and they had no editorial oversight over the contents of the review. The first time they are reading the review is when it's posted publicly. They only asked that I had the review done sometime in the first week of February. I’ve seen other feedback from reviews here and people appreciate a short summary, so I’ve made a TLDR for each section.
Background
I’m somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, I installed emergency vehicle equipment, including dash cams, for local law enforcement as a career for 20 years. We installed L3, Watchguard, and Coban systems, and installed giant fuse blocks to manage all the equipment. Not exactly 1:1 here, but the installation looked pretty familiar and straightforward from what I had seen in other reviews. As a hobbyist, I’ve installed aftermarket stereo and speaker equipment in every vehicle I’ve owned before the F150 Lightning.
Installation
TLDR: Pretty easy, follow what other forum denizens have done and use fuses 4 and 17-18. If you don’t want to run the rear camera along the headliner and potentially obstruct airbags, you’ll need the longer USB C cable. Test everything with the included 12v lighter adapter before you go through the trouble of installing it.
I love projects like this, so I decided to make an evening out of it and enjoy the cool weather with a nice beverage in my driveway while listening to a podcast. I always appreciate the effort put into the box opening experience, to me it just makes a product feel more premium and I was happy to see a nice presentation when I opened the box.
They sent along the 12v lighter adapter as well as an extra long cable for the rear camera which I did end up using. I have a habit of doing a LOT of research about projects like these so I can have an idea of exactly what needs to be done when I go out to the truck, to cut down on having to look stuff up on the fly, and this is what I’d recommend to anyone installing this.
It comes with generic instructions about how to decide which fuses to use, and the installation package it came with includes several fuses of different sizes, but nothing specific to the truck. This is the nature of aftermarket accessories of course, but doing a quick Google search for installation of a device + your make and model vehicle will usually yield some specific results on various platforms that will be a great help.
For the installation I will be hardwiring this and not using the 12v lighter adapter, but before tearing apart the truck, I plugged everything including the rear facing came into the 12v outlet to make sure they were functional.
Since there are several reviews here on the forums, I decided I wanted to include some specific things that I didn’t see mentioned in case anyone is using this to help guide their installation. Getting the pillar cover off is one of them, as I saw several people frustrated the using a screwdriver resulted in a scratched pillar. I was able to get it off without scratching up the plastic by using a very thin Allen wrench, inserting the short end into the tiny hole on the bottom of the pillar, working it until it was behind the plastic, and then using it as a lever to pop it right off. Easy peasy! I had seen warnings to unplug the small speaker before fully removing the pillar, here is where you do that, press down and pull back to release and now you have full access to the pillar.
With that out of the way I got to work running the cables. I decided to work on the power first and then run the USB C for the rear camera after I got that working. I held the camera up where I’d wanted it, and then just started tucking the cable under the overhead panel and down the pillar. There are wire clips in the pillar already, and I used those for simplicity’s sake. Then I ran the wire behind the weather stripping alongside where the door closes, and down the where the fuse box is on the interior of the cabin near the floor of the front passenger seat.
Once I got there, I popped the panels off and ran the wires back there and got started on figuring out the fuses. From reading other reviews, I was prepared to work awkwardly here due to the position of the box, and installation videos I had seen of ICE F150s showed that the box pops out and has a cover, but neither were the case with my Lightning.
Every review I had read for F150 Lightning installation used fuse position 4 for the constant 12v power and position 17-18 for the switching power. No sense in reinventing the wheel, so I trusted my Lightning brethren and decided to follow the beaten path. What was not clear to me was that this meant you are to remove the existing fuses in those positions and insert them into the fuse tap (which has its own fuse), and then insert the tap into the position where the first fuse was removed. It's the first time I've used these types of fuse taps, so just wanted to include that for any other first timers.
For position 4 this was easy but 17-18 is a different size fuse than the included tap. However, you can use one of the micro2 switches instead, without issue. The only problem is the fuse removed from this position does not fit, so you have to pull one of the many spares in the box to take its place. Believe it or not, I used the Ford AI assistant (shout out to Brian @Ford Motor Company ) and it was able to tell me instantly which fuses were labeled as spare in the manual without me having to look it up myself. Nice work Brian and Ford team that was definitely easier than digging through the manual.
After that, I grounded the wire to the nearest bolt, hooked each up to the appropriate input on the voltage detector, and it lit up instantly showing a voltage of 12.6v, and I knew we were in business. I wanted to use the security and parking features of the product without worrying about 12v battery drainage, I set this to 12.4v and, so far, it has worked well although I have seen others report that this needed to be set to 12.0 to work reliably, which has not been my experience so far. There is a lot of space behind the plastic trim and beneath the fuse box so I decided this is where I would hide my excess wire.
I went back to start on the rear camera. I read a couple of reviews warning that running it along the headboard could impede airbags, but I didn’t like the idea of wire coming up from the floor to the rear window, which is sliding, so I decided to go down the pillar, under plastic trim in the door frame where the rest of the wires run to the back seat, and then all the way to the corner behind the rear passenger seat, up the trim and then over to the rear window through the headliner, and then a short run down to the window itself. At first, I tried this with the shorter cable, but it was about 6” too short of being perfect, so I swapped it out for the extra long cable, rolled the excess and tucked it away with the voltage tester, and was ready to mount the cameras and wrap up the installation.
In my years of installing dash cams, I saw time and time again huge chunks of glass breaking off of the windshield when adhesive is used to mount these things and they need to be moved or removed. The adhesive is just that strong, so I was a bit apprehensive about this until I saw that they included some electrostatic clings to apply to the windshield first to prevent damage. Nice touch!
The clings however, are not without problems themselves. The material is VERY prone to creases, fingerprints, and general imperfections just by removing the plastic covering the adhesive, so if you’re the type to obsess about getting every last bubble and piece of lint out from under the screen protector on your phone, you’re gonna have a bad time here. It’s not so bad that it sticks out, but if you know to look for it, you’ll have no trouble spotting it.
The other problem is that they are huge and are large enough to potentially block the camera’s view of the road and impair the image quality, especially with scratches and bubbles present. My first inkling was to trim them, but in case they work like drywall anchors by using the entire surface area of the cling to hold the weight of the camera up, I decided to just make sure to position the cling high enough that it would not obstruct the view, which was more challenging on the rear camera, where I positioned it to the left of the lens since there was just not enough space to do it any other way.
Once they were up, I plugged everything in, and powered on the truck. The camera powered up instantly and I began cleaning up so I could take it for a spin.
Final installation looks like this:
Very happy with the final product as its mostly unnoticeable.
Using the Camera and Video Quality
TLDR: Very good video quality in both day and night. Exported video can include gps coordinates and speed if enabled in the options. Be certain you are happy with the view of the camera before attaching with adhesive, as the included mount only rotates on the vertical axis. Exported video is only 8bit color, so not sure if its true HDR. Would like if the lens was polarized to help reduce glare.
By this time, it was dark, and I was excited to see the video quality as I drove around town at night. As soon as I powered up, I saw there was easy 1-touch controls to turn off sound recording and voice control. Perfect! I turned them off and got driving. Once I saw the live video feed, I could see that I stuck the camera in a position that slightly favors the driver’s side, I wish their mount rotated on the horizontal axis for centering the view.
I did the installation in-between days of freezing temps here in Texas, so the trucks front and back glass were both extremely dirty, so once daytime came around, I went out and gave the truck a proper wash and cleaned the glass inside and out with Meguire’s glass cleaner and took it out for a spin again with very impressive results. Do note that nightime videos were taken when the windows were still quite dirty. Night drive to pick up dinner right after installation:
When viewing any of my videos, keep in mind I have my front windshield tinted with 5% UV film to cut down on heat, my back windows are all darkly tinted.
Main front cam:
Back Cam:
Interior Cam:
Overall, I’m really blown away with the video quality and would give it an A+, although I did notice that the exported video files show 8bit color depth when examined in windows. I seem to find conflicting information on whether true HDR color is possible with 8bit color, so just a note although I find the video color to be excellent either way. The only real complaint I have is not about video quality at all, its just the glare that is always present for obvious reasons. Although it might limit the color depth, I wish the lens was polarized to help reduce the glare coming off of the dash.
Camera Interface
TLDR: Works well but nothing fancy, small touch icons can be hard to tap if you’ve got large hands. Once you’ve got it set up. Its easy to forget the camera is even there. Wish you could manually mark a video while driving.
The interface for this device is pretty standard fare. The touch screen is responsive, and the UI is similar to any interface you’ve used with any point and shoot digital camera. Not fancy or particularly intuitive, but easy enough to understand and gets the job done, which is fine by me. If I have any complaint, it’s that I have large hands and fingers and I find it somewhat hard to make my finger hit only one of the quick access icons on the camera’s main operating screen. For example, I tried to turn the wifi off and accidentally also pressed the button that turned the mic back on. Partially my fault for having giant mitts for hands but a device this small could have more thought put into spacing the icons apart. A minor annoyance.
One thing that police dash cams have that I feel is really missing here is the ability to quickly mark a video as important. I wish I could double or triple tap the screen just to mark that moment as "important" so I could find it easily later.
Once you’ve got your settings in place, the camera does what I hoped it would: Becomes all but invisible. Powering on the truck, the camera beeps and then the screen turns off and you forget it’s there. There is a small blue light that flashes occasionally, to let you know it’s on, but its only noticeable if you’re looking for it. Perfect!
The Redtiger App & Software
TLDR: Interface itself isn’t great, I experienced some connectivity issues, and PC software has some suspect English language. But it all does work and gives a nice visual representation on a map that follows your vehicle as you play back the video. I can understand the lack of focus on the software since one would likely rarely need it.
This is really the only area I’m not satisfied with. Without doing any research about it, the app feels as if it’s not discretely developed for this camera, but an off-the-shelf app customized to work with this product, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all, if the base product is good and the customization is done right.
Unfortunately, the app/camera has some connectivity problems that I hope can be addressed. The camera creates its own "WLAN" for you to connect ad-hoc to download video. I was a bit disappointed by this, especially since the app makes you create an account for what seems like no purpose whatsoever. I hoped it had cloud functionality so I could download stuff without sitting in my truck if I connected the camera to my truck’s wifi, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A nice bonus is that you can fully configure the camera settings once connected, which is a nice feature for me due to my aforementioned sausage fingers.
By default, the camera breaks up the videos into 1min segments and with 3 cameras going at once, this makes for a lot of videos. There is no way in the app to filter by date/time, so you have to wait for all of the thumbnails to download and I had repeated connectivity issues just trying to download a list of the videos along with the thumbnails:
The app also repeatedly told me to turn off my Bluetooth to improve wifi performance, which made no sense to me, but I did it anyways and it did not help. I’m going to try setting the camera to use 5 or 10min segments and see if that makes this process less painful. This is disappointing because once you actually get the video downloaded to your phone, the app does have an impressive feature I hadn’t noticed in other reviews. If playing back video from the app, it shows a map on the bottom half of the screen that shows your movement on the map while the video plays. Here’s what it showed as I picked up dinner that night:
This is really cool and I can see this being a valuable tool in a lot of circumstances, I only wish the app had better performance. I did check for firmware updates, but the app said the camera was up to date. You can also remove the SD card to download a lot of videos at once, which I did to test the PC software, but normally it would not be necessary if the app worked better, and I just don’t want to have to use my PC or even an SD card adapter for viewing videos on modern day equipment, it just feels like a regression to me.
The PC software does make it easier to sort through lots of videos, and once you open the exported folders it gives you the ability to see all 3 cameras at once and automatically syncs them, along with a map just as shown in the app, which is pretty cool! Like the app though, this appears to be an off the shelf software, and seeing some questionable English and menu names in the app sorta made me wish I hadn’t installed it, but nothing overtly wrong with the app and I didn’t experience any bugs while using it.
Despite the drawbacks, there were no crashes at all, and I was able to find everything I was looking for. it works well enough and unless something crazy happens on the road, I would seldom use the software, so the drawbacks are not even close to dealbreaker territory for me.
Value and Overall Thoughts
TLDR: It’s pricey if you make no effort to save money. Get it on sale, as there seem to be frequent promotions that offer this closer to the $200 range, which is a good price IMO. Support answered the phone quickly and seemed eager to help, and their constant presence in auto forums means you can get help if you need it.
I’m pretty happy with the Redtiger F17 Elite so far, but there is still a question of price. The list price seems to be in the $300-$400 range depending on accessories, which is steep IMO and I would not see myself paying that much for a dash cam. However, in looking at this and other forums and, even just a cursory glance at their website shows a lot of opportunity to save money.
Looking at Camelizer for the price history on Amazon shows that it’s routinely available for around $219:
REDTIGER F17 Elite on Amazon
Buying directly from Redtiger seems to be the way to go, at the time of this review, this package was not only cheaper than Amazon but it includes more accessories and an extended warranty.
REDTIGER F17 Elite
Despite there being ways to save money, I’m sure there are still people who would think the price was too high compared to some of the cheaper cameras in the $100-$150 range that are on Amazon from manufacturers with unpronounceable names. To that I’ll say, Redtiger has a phone number listed right on their home page, and I called it to see what kind of support I could get for this higher premium. I did hear a recording that asked me to hold for an agent, and in 28 seconds, a human answered. I said I needed someone who could help me find the right fuse to use for installation and if they had anyone that could help. The person said yes and they’d be happy to help. I didn’t want to waste the time of their service agents so I just made an excuse to disconnect since I just wanted to see how easily I could get to a human, and the answer is that it's much easier than you can with most consumer electronics sold these days. Redtiger is also quite active on this forum and in other forums and socials, so there is definitely some peace of mind included in the price tag that I think helps make this worth the money.
Just for fun here's a quick 0-55(ish) in the Lightning!
6 seconds or so? Not bad for not even being in Sport mode and not slamming on the accelerator!
Overall, I think anyone who can pick this camera up on sale would be very happy with the performance. Thanks @Redtiger for trusting me to provide an honest review of this product.
Background
I’m somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, I installed emergency vehicle equipment, including dash cams, for local law enforcement as a career for 20 years. We installed L3, Watchguard, and Coban systems, and installed giant fuse blocks to manage all the equipment. Not exactly 1:1 here, but the installation looked pretty familiar and straightforward from what I had seen in other reviews. As a hobbyist, I’ve installed aftermarket stereo and speaker equipment in every vehicle I’ve owned before the F150 Lightning.
Installation
TLDR: Pretty easy, follow what other forum denizens have done and use fuses 4 and 17-18. If you don’t want to run the rear camera along the headliner and potentially obstruct airbags, you’ll need the longer USB C cable. Test everything with the included 12v lighter adapter before you go through the trouble of installing it.
I love projects like this, so I decided to make an evening out of it and enjoy the cool weather with a nice beverage in my driveway while listening to a podcast. I always appreciate the effort put into the box opening experience, to me it just makes a product feel more premium and I was happy to see a nice presentation when I opened the box.
They sent along the 12v lighter adapter as well as an extra long cable for the rear camera which I did end up using. I have a habit of doing a LOT of research about projects like these so I can have an idea of exactly what needs to be done when I go out to the truck, to cut down on having to look stuff up on the fly, and this is what I’d recommend to anyone installing this.
It comes with generic instructions about how to decide which fuses to use, and the installation package it came with includes several fuses of different sizes, but nothing specific to the truck. This is the nature of aftermarket accessories of course, but doing a quick Google search for installation of a device + your make and model vehicle will usually yield some specific results on various platforms that will be a great help.
For the installation I will be hardwiring this and not using the 12v lighter adapter, but before tearing apart the truck, I plugged everything including the rear facing came into the 12v outlet to make sure they were functional.
Since there are several reviews here on the forums, I decided I wanted to include some specific things that I didn’t see mentioned in case anyone is using this to help guide their installation. Getting the pillar cover off is one of them, as I saw several people frustrated the using a screwdriver resulted in a scratched pillar. I was able to get it off without scratching up the plastic by using a very thin Allen wrench, inserting the short end into the tiny hole on the bottom of the pillar, working it until it was behind the plastic, and then using it as a lever to pop it right off. Easy peasy! I had seen warnings to unplug the small speaker before fully removing the pillar, here is where you do that, press down and pull back to release and now you have full access to the pillar.
With that out of the way I got to work running the cables. I decided to work on the power first and then run the USB C for the rear camera after I got that working. I held the camera up where I’d wanted it, and then just started tucking the cable under the overhead panel and down the pillar. There are wire clips in the pillar already, and I used those for simplicity’s sake. Then I ran the wire behind the weather stripping alongside where the door closes, and down the where the fuse box is on the interior of the cabin near the floor of the front passenger seat.
Once I got there, I popped the panels off and ran the wires back there and got started on figuring out the fuses. From reading other reviews, I was prepared to work awkwardly here due to the position of the box, and installation videos I had seen of ICE F150s showed that the box pops out and has a cover, but neither were the case with my Lightning.
Every review I had read for F150 Lightning installation used fuse position 4 for the constant 12v power and position 17-18 for the switching power. No sense in reinventing the wheel, so I trusted my Lightning brethren and decided to follow the beaten path. What was not clear to me was that this meant you are to remove the existing fuses in those positions and insert them into the fuse tap (which has its own fuse), and then insert the tap into the position where the first fuse was removed. It's the first time I've used these types of fuse taps, so just wanted to include that for any other first timers.
For position 4 this was easy but 17-18 is a different size fuse than the included tap. However, you can use one of the micro2 switches instead, without issue. The only problem is the fuse removed from this position does not fit, so you have to pull one of the many spares in the box to take its place. Believe it or not, I used the Ford AI assistant (shout out to Brian @Ford Motor Company ) and it was able to tell me instantly which fuses were labeled as spare in the manual without me having to look it up myself. Nice work Brian and Ford team that was definitely easier than digging through the manual.
After that, I grounded the wire to the nearest bolt, hooked each up to the appropriate input on the voltage detector, and it lit up instantly showing a voltage of 12.6v, and I knew we were in business. I wanted to use the security and parking features of the product without worrying about 12v battery drainage, I set this to 12.4v and, so far, it has worked well although I have seen others report that this needed to be set to 12.0 to work reliably, which has not been my experience so far. There is a lot of space behind the plastic trim and beneath the fuse box so I decided this is where I would hide my excess wire.
I went back to start on the rear camera. I read a couple of reviews warning that running it along the headboard could impede airbags, but I didn’t like the idea of wire coming up from the floor to the rear window, which is sliding, so I decided to go down the pillar, under plastic trim in the door frame where the rest of the wires run to the back seat, and then all the way to the corner behind the rear passenger seat, up the trim and then over to the rear window through the headliner, and then a short run down to the window itself. At first, I tried this with the shorter cable, but it was about 6” too short of being perfect, so I swapped it out for the extra long cable, rolled the excess and tucked it away with the voltage tester, and was ready to mount the cameras and wrap up the installation.
In my years of installing dash cams, I saw time and time again huge chunks of glass breaking off of the windshield when adhesive is used to mount these things and they need to be moved or removed. The adhesive is just that strong, so I was a bit apprehensive about this until I saw that they included some electrostatic clings to apply to the windshield first to prevent damage. Nice touch!
The clings however, are not without problems themselves. The material is VERY prone to creases, fingerprints, and general imperfections just by removing the plastic covering the adhesive, so if you’re the type to obsess about getting every last bubble and piece of lint out from under the screen protector on your phone, you’re gonna have a bad time here. It’s not so bad that it sticks out, but if you know to look for it, you’ll have no trouble spotting it.
The other problem is that they are huge and are large enough to potentially block the camera’s view of the road and impair the image quality, especially with scratches and bubbles present. My first inkling was to trim them, but in case they work like drywall anchors by using the entire surface area of the cling to hold the weight of the camera up, I decided to just make sure to position the cling high enough that it would not obstruct the view, which was more challenging on the rear camera, where I positioned it to the left of the lens since there was just not enough space to do it any other way.
Once they were up, I plugged everything in, and powered on the truck. The camera powered up instantly and I began cleaning up so I could take it for a spin.
Final installation looks like this:
Very happy with the final product as its mostly unnoticeable.
Using the Camera and Video Quality
TLDR: Very good video quality in both day and night. Exported video can include gps coordinates and speed if enabled in the options. Be certain you are happy with the view of the camera before attaching with adhesive, as the included mount only rotates on the vertical axis. Exported video is only 8bit color, so not sure if its true HDR. Would like if the lens was polarized to help reduce glare.
By this time, it was dark, and I was excited to see the video quality as I drove around town at night. As soon as I powered up, I saw there was easy 1-touch controls to turn off sound recording and voice control. Perfect! I turned them off and got driving. Once I saw the live video feed, I could see that I stuck the camera in a position that slightly favors the driver’s side, I wish their mount rotated on the horizontal axis for centering the view.
I did the installation in-between days of freezing temps here in Texas, so the trucks front and back glass were both extremely dirty, so once daytime came around, I went out and gave the truck a proper wash and cleaned the glass inside and out with Meguire’s glass cleaner and took it out for a spin again with very impressive results. Do note that nightime videos were taken when the windows were still quite dirty. Night drive to pick up dinner right after installation:
When viewing any of my videos, keep in mind I have my front windshield tinted with 5% UV film to cut down on heat, my back windows are all darkly tinted.
Main front cam:
Back Cam:
Interior Cam:
Overall, I’m really blown away with the video quality and would give it an A+, although I did notice that the exported video files show 8bit color depth when examined in windows. I seem to find conflicting information on whether true HDR color is possible with 8bit color, so just a note although I find the video color to be excellent either way. The only real complaint I have is not about video quality at all, its just the glare that is always present for obvious reasons. Although it might limit the color depth, I wish the lens was polarized to help reduce the glare coming off of the dash.
Camera Interface
TLDR: Works well but nothing fancy, small touch icons can be hard to tap if you’ve got large hands. Once you’ve got it set up. Its easy to forget the camera is even there. Wish you could manually mark a video while driving.
The interface for this device is pretty standard fare. The touch screen is responsive, and the UI is similar to any interface you’ve used with any point and shoot digital camera. Not fancy or particularly intuitive, but easy enough to understand and gets the job done, which is fine by me. If I have any complaint, it’s that I have large hands and fingers and I find it somewhat hard to make my finger hit only one of the quick access icons on the camera’s main operating screen. For example, I tried to turn the wifi off and accidentally also pressed the button that turned the mic back on. Partially my fault for having giant mitts for hands but a device this small could have more thought put into spacing the icons apart. A minor annoyance.
One thing that police dash cams have that I feel is really missing here is the ability to quickly mark a video as important. I wish I could double or triple tap the screen just to mark that moment as "important" so I could find it easily later.
Once you’ve got your settings in place, the camera does what I hoped it would: Becomes all but invisible. Powering on the truck, the camera beeps and then the screen turns off and you forget it’s there. There is a small blue light that flashes occasionally, to let you know it’s on, but its only noticeable if you’re looking for it. Perfect!
The Redtiger App & Software
TLDR: Interface itself isn’t great, I experienced some connectivity issues, and PC software has some suspect English language. But it all does work and gives a nice visual representation on a map that follows your vehicle as you play back the video. I can understand the lack of focus on the software since one would likely rarely need it.
This is really the only area I’m not satisfied with. Without doing any research about it, the app feels as if it’s not discretely developed for this camera, but an off-the-shelf app customized to work with this product, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all, if the base product is good and the customization is done right.
Unfortunately, the app/camera has some connectivity problems that I hope can be addressed. The camera creates its own "WLAN" for you to connect ad-hoc to download video. I was a bit disappointed by this, especially since the app makes you create an account for what seems like no purpose whatsoever. I hoped it had cloud functionality so I could download stuff without sitting in my truck if I connected the camera to my truck’s wifi, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A nice bonus is that you can fully configure the camera settings once connected, which is a nice feature for me due to my aforementioned sausage fingers.
By default, the camera breaks up the videos into 1min segments and with 3 cameras going at once, this makes for a lot of videos. There is no way in the app to filter by date/time, so you have to wait for all of the thumbnails to download and I had repeated connectivity issues just trying to download a list of the videos along with the thumbnails:
The app also repeatedly told me to turn off my Bluetooth to improve wifi performance, which made no sense to me, but I did it anyways and it did not help. I’m going to try setting the camera to use 5 or 10min segments and see if that makes this process less painful. This is disappointing because once you actually get the video downloaded to your phone, the app does have an impressive feature I hadn’t noticed in other reviews. If playing back video from the app, it shows a map on the bottom half of the screen that shows your movement on the map while the video plays. Here’s what it showed as I picked up dinner that night:
This is really cool and I can see this being a valuable tool in a lot of circumstances, I only wish the app had better performance. I did check for firmware updates, but the app said the camera was up to date. You can also remove the SD card to download a lot of videos at once, which I did to test the PC software, but normally it would not be necessary if the app worked better, and I just don’t want to have to use my PC or even an SD card adapter for viewing videos on modern day equipment, it just feels like a regression to me.
The PC software does make it easier to sort through lots of videos, and once you open the exported folders it gives you the ability to see all 3 cameras at once and automatically syncs them, along with a map just as shown in the app, which is pretty cool! Like the app though, this appears to be an off the shelf software, and seeing some questionable English and menu names in the app sorta made me wish I hadn’t installed it, but nothing overtly wrong with the app and I didn’t experience any bugs while using it.
Despite the drawbacks, there were no crashes at all, and I was able to find everything I was looking for. it works well enough and unless something crazy happens on the road, I would seldom use the software, so the drawbacks are not even close to dealbreaker territory for me.
Value and Overall Thoughts
TLDR: It’s pricey if you make no effort to save money. Get it on sale, as there seem to be frequent promotions that offer this closer to the $200 range, which is a good price IMO. Support answered the phone quickly and seemed eager to help, and their constant presence in auto forums means you can get help if you need it.
I’m pretty happy with the Redtiger F17 Elite so far, but there is still a question of price. The list price seems to be in the $300-$400 range depending on accessories, which is steep IMO and I would not see myself paying that much for a dash cam. However, in looking at this and other forums and, even just a cursory glance at their website shows a lot of opportunity to save money.
Looking at Camelizer for the price history on Amazon shows that it’s routinely available for around $219:
REDTIGER F17 Elite on Amazon
Buying directly from Redtiger seems to be the way to go, at the time of this review, this package was not only cheaper than Amazon but it includes more accessories and an extended warranty.
REDTIGER F17 Elite
Despite there being ways to save money, I’m sure there are still people who would think the price was too high compared to some of the cheaper cameras in the $100-$150 range that are on Amazon from manufacturers with unpronounceable names. To that I’ll say, Redtiger has a phone number listed right on their home page, and I called it to see what kind of support I could get for this higher premium. I did hear a recording that asked me to hold for an agent, and in 28 seconds, a human answered. I said I needed someone who could help me find the right fuse to use for installation and if they had anyone that could help. The person said yes and they’d be happy to help. I didn’t want to waste the time of their service agents so I just made an excuse to disconnect since I just wanted to see how easily I could get to a human, and the answer is that it's much easier than you can with most consumer electronics sold these days. Redtiger is also quite active on this forum and in other forums and socials, so there is definitely some peace of mind included in the price tag that I think helps make this worth the money.
Just for fun here's a quick 0-55(ish) in the Lightning!
6 seconds or so? Not bad for not even being in Sport mode and not slamming on the accelerator!
Overall, I think anyone who can pick this camera up on sale would be very happy with the performance. Thanks @Redtiger for trusting me to provide an honest review of this product.
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