You ought to have a headlight and taillight on your bike if there’s even the remotest chance of being caught out after dusk. It does wonders for being seen by cars, you know, those wild predators of the bicycle.
So it stands to reason that somebody should package a video camera alongside one. Garmin, maker of everyone’s favorite “get lost and then get home” navigational gear, is that somebody?
big specs, big price
One of the Varia Vue’s cooler features borrows a page from cars’ dash cams. In the event of a crash, the Varia Vue will automatically save video immediately before, during, and after the event. Under normal operation the camera is continuously recording and, after a while, overwriting its older video so that the MicroSD card (required and not included) doesn’t fill up. The MicroSD card you supply can be anywhere from 8GB to 512GB.
Garmin doesn’t say how many seconds of footage before and after each event it saves. Nonetheless, it’s helpful to know that the unit will save your footage without you having to remember to go into the Garmin app and save it manually.
If you were to get punted off your bike by an errant driver, you’d be forgiven for being too shaken up—or incapacitated—to remember to save the footage that could be required or useful in speaking to an insurance company, a lawyer, or the cops.
Garmin’s 4K Dash Cam for Bikes
Let’s not leave that integrated headlight in the dark, though. It throws 600 lumens in day flash mode, which is a fairly powerful beam of light. Set to a steady light, as you’d use for more than just making yourself visible to traffic, there are three settings: 550 lumens, 300 lumens, and 140 lumens, plus a 400-lumen night flash mode.
There are, broadly, two categories of bike lights: those merely for being seen by traffic, which don’t throw much light to illuminate the road ahead, and those more powerful ones that are for lighting up a pitch-black road. With its powerful beam, the Varia Vue is the latter.
With the option to record in 4K (at 30 frames per second, 1440P (30 fps), or 1080p (at 30 or 60 fps), you can eek up to seven hours of nine hours of recording at 1080p/30 fps or six hours of recording at 4K/30 fps, if you keep the headlight off. Set to day flash at 1080p/30 fps, you can still record up to seven hours of footage.
If you pair the Varia Vue with a compatible Garmin Edge cycling computer, Garmin smartwatch, or use the Varia app, you can also automatically save GPS-registered speed and location info to your videos. The Varia app lets you control camera and light functions, edit videos, and add data overlays.
If there’s a downside, it’s the initial shock of the $550 price. Given that a 600-lumen headlight on its own isn’t cheap, and neither is a quality action camera, such a GoPro, the Varia Vue costs about what you’d pay if you bought such gear separately. But maybe that’s the rationalization talking.
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