Best dash cams for UK drivers: five picks worth fitting

The 622GW is Nextbase's flagship and the most complete single-camera option here. It records 4K from the front, stamps clips with GPS position and speed, and talks to the Nextbase app over Wi-Fi, so you can review and download footage from the driver's seat instead of wrestling a card out of the mount. The touchscreen on the back makes framing the shot and changing settings straightforward, and there's a rear window camera you can add later if one view turns out not to be enough.

The extras — Alexa voice control, Emergency SOS, what3words location sharing — are features you'll either use constantly or ignore entirely. What matters more is that the package feels finished: a sturdy mount, menus that make sense, and the friendliest app of the five.

It is also the priciest way here to get front-and-rear coverage, the rear camera is an extra purchase, and 4K files are big enough that you'll want a fast, high-capacity card.

If your worry is the car behind rather than the road ahead, this is the sensible buy. The A229 Plus 2CH arrives as a complete kit: a 2K front camera, a 2K rear camera on a long cable, and a GPS mount that logs your speed and position. Both units use current Sony STARVIS 2 sensors — the bit of the specification that really matters after dark — and both record at the same resolution, unlike cheap twin kits that pair a decent front camera with a mushy 1080p rear one.

Buffered parking mode is the other reason to choose it. With the optional hardwire kit, the camera keeps a rolling few seconds in memory and saves the footage from just before an impact, which is exactly the clip you need when someone reverses into you in a multi-storey.

Be ready for a DIY afternoon: routing the rear cable through the headlining and into the boot lid takes time and a set of trim tools. The menus and app are functional rather than slick, so set everything up at home before you stick anything to the glass.

The Mini 2 is roughly the size of a matchbox, which is the whole point. Clipped behind the mirror it disappears from the driver's view, adds no clutter to the windscreen and comes off easily when you sell the car or hand back a lease. It records 1080p through a wide lens, has no screen at all, and is set up and reviewed through the Garmin Drive app — one of the friendlier ones on the market.

Voice commands let you save a clip or start audio recording without taking a hand off the wheel, and the camera keeps the saved file rather than overwriting it in the loop. If you later want a second view, Garmin's app can manage more than one of its cameras from the same phone.

The trade-off is detail. At 1080p, a number plate two or three car lengths ahead in poor light is a stretch, and there's no built-in GPS, so clips don't carry speed or location. Parking mode also needs Garmin's separate cable.

Thinkware builds cameras for people who leave their car on the street. The F200 Pro is a compact 1080p unit, with an optional rear camera, designed around parking surveillance: hardwire it and it keeps watch while you're away, recording time-lapse footage when the car is quiet and switching to normal recording when the motion sensor or impact sensor is triggered.

A supercapacitor means there's no lithium battery cooking on the windscreen, and the app covers the settings that actually matter — sensitivity, battery protection voltage and how parking mode behaves — so you can tune it to your car and your parking spot instead of accepting the defaults.

It isn't the camera to buy for the sharpest daytime plates; 1080p looks modest next to the 2K and 4K options here. Buy it because you want continuous cover of a parked car and a camera that quietly gets on with the job.

The A119 V3 is the enthusiast's budget pick and still one of the best ways to spend a modest amount on a dash cam. It records 1440p from a Sony STARVIS sensor, which is plenty to read plates at sensible distances in daylight, and it uses a supercapacitor rather than a battery. The wedge-shaped body sits tight to the glass, and the optional GPS mount adds speed and location to each file.

There's no rear camera, no touchscreen and no Wi-Fi on the standard version, so you retrieve footage by taking the card out — which is fine, and often quicker than a slow app download. Setup is a handful of buttons and a text menu, so give yourself twenty minutes with the instructions before sticking it to the screen.

What you're buying is image quality and dependability at the expense of conveniences. If you want an app, a screen or a second camera, spend more.