Vantrue Nexus 4S Review

Design and features

• On the big side
• No driver aids
• Basic app

You wouldn’t necessarily buy this dash camera for the way it looks. While products like the Vantrue E1 Pro cram decent video quality into the smallest practical design, the Vantrue Nexus 4S is on the big side. Its bar-shaped design isn’t quite ideal for modern cars, which tend to have a large binnacle behind the rear-view mirror. In the UK you usually need to mount dash cams to the left of this so they’re not in the driver’s view: given this dash cam’s front camera is also on the car’s left side, it ends up significantly off centre.

I don’t love the Vantrue Nexus 4S’ mount. While this dash cam comes with a couple of electrostatic stickers, which help you position it and remove it from the window without leaving a mess, the camera itself doesn’t snap in place as positively as some other magnetic designs. The mount lets you tweak the camera position, but it’s not the most authoritative design – it seems to move fractionally before encountering greater resistance.

When mounting this camera it’s important to remember that it also has a rear-facing lens. Again, it’s not ideal in a right-hand drive market that this is on the car’s right, as you need to make sure the rear-view mirror doesn’t obscure it. Even with the front unit some way into my front passenger’s view, the mirror still blocked my face in recordings.

Vantrue’s website suggests you should get a weatherproof rear camera in this bundle, suitable for mounting either on the rear screen, or externally above your rear licence plate. That’s a great idea, potentially getting a distraction out of your rear view, but my review sample had a standard bullet-shaped camera designed only for interior use. It’s linked to the front camera by quite a thick cable that might be tricky to sneak behind the headlining – fortunately Vantrue bundles several sticky clips to help keep things tidy if you have to route it in plain sight.

This bundle includes a cigarette lighter-style car power cable with a spare USB-A port that’s rated only at 10W – not enough to fast-charge a modern smartphone.

Like most dash cams, this one comes without a micro SD card. At the maximum available resolution it saves three 100MB+ files every minute, so a 256GB card ought to provide around 12 hours of recording – enough for a lengthy return trip. Invest in the maximum 1TB card and you could store a couple of days’ continuous driving, which might be enough for a week’s worth of professional shifts.

I’m not a fan of driver aids on dash cams, as they aren’t always reliable, and they’re not linked into your car’s active safety systems so they can’t help you take action. If you are looking for features like a lane-keeping assist for an older car that doesn’t have it, this dash cam can’t oblige. It does offer bump-sensing, through which it locks a recording if an impact is detected. There’s a parking mode, too, but you’ll need the hardwiring kit to support it.

You can view videos by removing the micro SD card and viewing its contents, or you can access them through the Vantrue app. There’s not much wrong with this – it offers a good selection of settings, in particular – but it’s not especially helpful when you want to find a specific clip. Drive for several hours and you’ll have to navigate a folder containing hundreds of video thumbnails.

Performance and video quality

• Great front video quality, but not at 1,944p
• Exceptional number plate performance
• Unexceptional rear video at night

It’s hard to fault the Vantrue Nexus 4S’ video performance, with one important caveat: when recording at 1944p my test sample encoded video in the wrong aspect ratio, so that when played back on the app or my PC the result looked pinched, with tall, thin vehicles.

I’d expect this bug to be fixed in a future firmware update, but for my purposes the fix was to drop down to 1440p resolution.

Front video quality was otherwise very strong. While I didn’t get the chance to test this dash cam in rain, it had no problem with flat, overcast weather, or with the deep shadows and bright skies of searing summer days. At night, video was as sharp and well-exposed as I’ve seen from other dash cams using STARVIS 2 sensors. In fact the Nexus 4S came very close to matching the Viofo A329 – still my benchmark for all-round video quality. Only a lower resolution and frame rate let it down.

At night, number plates are notoriously tricky to capture, as they either lurk in the shadows or reflect your headlights and overwhelm the camera’s sensor. The Nexus 4S excelled in my nighttime trip around the block, producing a clearly legible image of almost every number plate I drove past, provided it got at least a momentary brush from my lights. This was head and shoulders above any other dash cam I’ve reviewed, even those with better outright video quality, and other Vantrue models that use the company’s PlatePix enhancement.

Fortunately, this bundle’s other two cameras don’t let the side down. Footage from the cabin camera was also well exposed, with the Nexus 4S’ HDR ensuring that both the dark interior and bright outside were captured in the same shot. At night, infrared lighting ensured the dash cam captured what passengers were up to, although in my car the passenger sun visor and mirror were always crowding into the frame.

My only other issue with footage shot from the front and cabin cameras was that in both, it was possible to see a little camera shake on rough road surfaces or over harsh speed bumps. As suspected, the mount didn’t quite hold the dash cam firm enough to prevent it, but most users would be unlikely to notice the effect.

This bundle’s rear camera performed adequately at night, but it didn’t seem a match for the quality of the other two – odd, given all three use the same family of sensor. Rear footage is always worst at night, however, given it’s entirely reliant on ambient light or car headlights, and I’ve certainly seen much worse. During the day it was good, coping well with deep shadows that trip some rear-facing units up.

Should you buy it?