So, to cover the basics, the F17 Plus is a no-frills, all-function 4-channel dashcam. I believe the idea behind this cam is to give you 4-channel recording at a more affordable price point. You get a 2.7k front facing camera, while the front interior, rear interior, and rear cameras are all 1080p. Both interior cams have night vision capability.
Unboxing the package is simple and straightforward. Instructions are clear and easy to interpret for the most part. The cameras are securely packed in a foam surround, but a foam sheet that goes across the top would be a nice improvement to help protect against damage from sharp objects that may puncture the top. I haven't had any issues with shipping damage yet but that's always a possibility.
Installation is fundamentally no different than any other dashcam with a similar setup, i.e. main cam on front windshield, rear cam mounted to rear windshield. I personally think that the power cable for hardwiring the dashcam could be about a foot longer to better accommodate some larger vehicles. It would also be nice if the power cable had a straight plug instead of an L-shaped plug, or if we had the option to choose. Depending on where/how you mount the dashcam, the L-shaped cable crosses right over or under the straight rear cam cable, which can put stress on the rear cam cable's connector. This may be a little nitpicky, but it's something I did notice with the F17 Elite and the VC70 as well. Here's a couple of pics to show what I mean:
Dashcam operation is intuitive and easy to navigate. The touchscreen is responsive and voice control works fine. It may be worth noting that you can configure the camera to "turn off" the front interior cam and/or rear interior cam. This is helpful if you want to better manage the storage space on your microSD card. With regard to menu operation compared to one of Redtiger's more expensive dashcams, the menu does not "scroll" like it does with those dashcams. Instead, swiping up and down on the menu screen takes you to the next "page" of menu items, but there is no transition. It would be much nicer if there was a simple transition between menu pages, like a simple fade in/out.
Personally I find video quality to be perfectly fine for everyday use. This cam doesn't have quite as good image quality in low light as my other cams, and compared to the VC70 and F17 Elite, it is lacking when it comes to parking mode footage at night. But it is good enough to capture incidents and provide evidence. Audio quality is not great - there seems to be some distortion in my recordings and I was just speaking normally with music at a fairly low volume. Audio quality in other dashcams I've used has been much better.
One standout thing for me that I noticed with the F17 Plus - On my other Redtiger cams, you have to press a button to "wake" the screen, then press the Lock button to lock the clips. Once I noticed this on those cams, I mentioned it to my Redtiger contact and they said they would forward the suggestion to their teams. Now, with this F17 Plus, when the screen saver is on (i.e. the dashcam is recording but the screen is off), if you press the Lock button, it immediately locks the current clip. No more 2-button presses to lock the clips! I appreciate that they took this feedback to heart and implemented it. Hopefully this function can be implemented via firmware update to my other dashcams.
Speaking of updates, it appears that the app has been updated again to improve how you pull clips from the dashcam. You can now select clips from the Playback menu, and when you press download, you get a prompt asking if you want to download the clip to the app, or save it directly to your device memory. It's a bit more streamlined from how it used to be, when you'd have to save to the app first, then download the clips afterwards.
Also, when reviewing the feature set on the website, I noticed that the F17 Elite and VC70 cams use 5.8gHz WiFi for transfer speeds up to 30mb/s. The F17 Plus also uses 5.8gHz WiFi but the listing says it's transfer speeds are only up to 8mb/s. This might seem like the F17 Plus would be slower to download clips, but in practice, it downloads clips just as fast as the other dashcams because the file sizes are smaller due to the lower resolution.
Here's some sample daytime and nighttime (or in this case, early morning) video clips.
Final verdict - I'd say this is a great option for rideshare drivers or those with families and/or pets. It's very no nonsense, easy to set up and adjust, with a good feature set that doesn't break the bank.
Phew, this ended up being longer than I intended it to be. Hopefully, when I post this to Reddit, I'm not accused of AI spam like I was with my first dashcam review lol.
