Vantrue Nexus 5S Review

Design and features

• Not the best mounting system
• No driver aids
• Basic app

I really don’t love this dash cam’s overall design. While it’s not unattractive, it’s a little on the large side, making it hard to mount it particularly close to the centre line of the typical car – it was too big to fit unobtrusively behind my rear-view mirror. That’s a problem, particularly for the UK’s right-hand drive cars, as the front-facing camera is on this dash cam’s left, and the rear-facing camera to its right.

Positioned left of your mirror, the front view ends up quite off-centre, while you need to place the unit carefully to avoid the rear-camera being blocked by your mirror.

Another slight negative is the mount itself. Although you can remove the Vantrue Nexus 5S, it doesn’t click back in as positively as the best systems. More significantly, the mount itself doesn’t feel firm enough – it’s too easy to knock the camera off target when pressing its buttons or removing or refitting a MicroSD card. At least you can use the large screen to view what the camera’s capturing while you reposition it.

Typically for a dash cam, you don’t get a memory card in the box, which feels a little cheap at this price. With four cameras you’ll need to invest in a reasonably big one. The front-facing lens shoots up to 2592×1944 resolution (1944p), the rear 1440p, and both cabin cameras 1080p – I found this accounted for around 375MB of storage space per minute. That’s enough to fill 128GB of storage in less than six hours – good job this camera accepts up to a 1TB card.

The front and rear units are linked by a USB cable that’s even thicker than the chunky one supplied with the Vantrue Nexus 4S – a cheaper model with lower front resolution, an external-facing rear camera, and just a single cabin camera. This bundle’s cable may prove too thick to lever into the headlining on some vehicles, so it’s a good thing Vantrue includes a few self-adhesive cable clips you could use to keep it tidy along the roofline.

There’s also a cigarette-lighter style power adaptor with a spare USB-A port, sadly limited to a fairly weak 10W output.

You need to take a little more care than usual to position this camera’s rear unit correctly, particularly making sure you follow the orientation instructions to get the cabin camera pointing forwards. I found it had a green power light that couldn’t be turned off, although I only noticed it when driving at night.

I often bang on about driver aids on dash cams – I’m not convinced they’re helpful, as in my experience they respond less reliably than the systems built in to most new cars. With no connection to active safety systems, they can’t help you brake or steer out of trouble like a car can, either. If you’re similarly minded, you won’t mind that the Vantrue Nexus 5S has no AI assistance – although that’s perhaps a bit disappointing given its price.

You may also be disappointed if you’re expecting a slick app. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the Vantrue Android experience – the app is responsive and with 5GHz Wi-Fi downloads are quick – but it’s not especially helpful. Videos are stored in one big folder, so you need to go scrolling if you’re after something in particular: the best alternatives use a timeline that lets you quickly home in on specific points in a journey. At least it’s easy to get at detailed settings.

It’s also easy to eject the MicroSD card and view its contents on a computer – I generally find this more convenient than browsing on my phone in the car, anyway.

Performance and video quality

• Excellent video quality – but not the best
• Disappointing number plate performance
• Tricky to avoid IR cameras dazzling each other

I was impressed by the video performance of the three-channel Vantrue Nexus 4S, so I was expecting great things from the Nexus 5S – it only partially delivered. In daylight, both of its external-facing cameras produced high-quality, sharp and well-exposed video in which pedestrians, vehicles and the environment were clear. From the front camera in particular it was easy to read number plates, even with a reasonable closing speed. It was a little less easy to read plates from the rear camera – like most dash cams, its wide-angle lens means other car number plates are small objects, often travelling quickly across the frame.

By day, the cabin cameras were great. The front-facing cabin camera caught excellent footage, exposing my car’s occupants well. The rear-facing inside camera was also strong, although with the sun high in the sky the rear of the cabin tended to appear gloomy.

On playback I found it slightly odd watching my car from a vantage point at the very rear of the cabin, inducing queasiness if the footage happened to be shot as I was driving along a winding country road – now I know how my children feel.

With the help of their inbuilt infrared lighting, both interior cameras together captured everything going on inside my car on night drives. Neither unit’s infrared lights had a visible component, so I didn’t find them distracting as I drove. One slight issue with night interior footage was that each camera had a bright spot where the opposing camera’s IR light fell in its frame. This was particularly noticeable in footage from the rear-facing camera. It’s not really possible to avoid this, and it didn’t cover enough of either shot to be a big problem.

As I’d expected, this dash cam’s exterior cameras did a good job into the evening and night. The front camera generally performed excellently on my trip around a city centre block, capturing shopfronts, unlit pavements and shady areas as well as everything happening on the road. There was one big disappointment, however: while the PlatePix feature on the Nexus 4S captured almost every number plate I passed, this camera doesn’t have it. Very few plates were legible in my night footage, a curious result given that this dash cam sits higher up the range than the 4S.

Without the benefit of light from your own headlights, rear-facing cameras usually struggle more at night – often the only illumination out of town is your own brake light. Despite this my rearward footage was acceptable, with only some streaking as I turned tighter corners on city blocks. This was certainly good enough – it would have caught the gist of anything happening behind unless it took place in deep shadow.

Overall this dash cam produces some of the most comprehensive coverage you can get – only the direct side views from your car are left uncovered. All of its four cameras performed solidly during the day and at night, ideal for documenting everything happening inside and outside a vehicle as you drive. While significantly better than the Botslab G980H Multi Channel – a four-camera bundle covering those left and right views – this still wasn’t quite a match for the Viofo A329, my current reference dash cam for outright image quality. It’s also quite expensive, and I’m not convinced it’s fully worth it.

Should you buy it?