My car came with a reversing camera integrated into the whole car entertainment and control mess. (Toyota/Lexus Harmon Kardon.) There were owners who hacked the system by the simple expedient of adding an override switch for the reverse sensor switch input from the gearbox. On the whole, this seemed like a dopey idea. I find the screen distracting at the best of times, and usually have it turned off. There might be limited value with say trying to hitch a trailer where it is of value.
My next car (I pick it up next week) has the whole full circle of cameras with virtual external views and the like. They do work in any travel direction, but I have feeling is limited to a maximum speed. That does seem to provide a nice step in utility for close in manoeuvring and parking. The car records from all cameras and creates incident videos automatically. So no need for a dashcam. There is an aftermarket kit for my old car that provides almost all this for not much. Requires a lot of routing of wires, and not for the faint of heart. I would bet professional installation would greatly exceed the price of the kit. Was I not upgrading I was seriously thinking about installing one myself. But the spectre of a wasted weekend pulling cables though the bodywork with the attendant skinned knuckles and general frustration might have been enough for me not to bother.
A friend recently bought a Cadillac SUV that replaces the central rear-view mirror with a live display showing what the camera on the back of the vehicle sees. He says it’s handy when you load up the cargo section with so much stuff that a mirror wouldn’t have a clear line of sight. I suppose that’s a pro, but one con I can see (no pun intended) is that the image in the mirror is no longer many yards away from the driver’s eyes, it’s now just a foot away. My middle-aged eyeballs struggle to focus well at such close distances; it’s fine if the speedometer is a little bit blurry, but I’d rather not have any lack of clarity when I’m trying to see what hazards exist outside of my vehicle.
My own car has cameras all over the exterior - front, rear, and looking down from the side mirror pods. When I put the xmission in reverse, the dashboard display shows a view of what’s directly behind me, and it also shows another view in which it remaps and assembles all four camera images to create a birds-eye view of the entire vehicle perimeter, making it trivially easy to park between lines in a parking lot. All of this shuts off automatically when I put the xmission in drive or park. I can manually turn all of this on with a dashboard button, but it will shut off as soon as my forward speed exceeds some threshold value (5-10 MPH).
Check your manual, the cars I’ve driven have the option to turn off the reverse camera as soon as you take the car out of reverse or have it stay on until you reach a certain speed (~8mph).
For me, having it on all the time isn’t like having a video playing on it, the distracting part is the constant zooming out effect that it has as everything comes in from the edges of the screen and converges to the center. It’s like watching out the back window of Spaceball One as it goes into ludicrous speed.
Aside from the issues mentioned with nearsightedness, almost everything they talked about was “you’re noticing X because screens are slightly different from mirrors in way Y and that gives slightly different results”. But none of these are things that are actually better about mirrors than screens. They’re just preferences.
I’m younger than the author, and perhaps more used to screens; I have no issues with camera based rear view mirrors. They don’t feel “off” to me at all. Probably just because I am not quite as stuck in a mirror rut as the author (and because unlike the rest of the issues brought up in the article the eyesight thing sounds legitimate).
The eyesight thing is definitely legit, but will affect different drivers differently. I was super uncomfortable in a Toyota i test drove, because they did some optics magic to make some of the controls look farther away than they really are. My far-sighted friend LOVED that feature; it made the car more accessible to him. But I’m wearing progressive lenses, and it meant i had to bring my head uncomfortably far down, losing focus on the road, to see the same display.
The article brings up valid points, but the fact that it’s light-generating is not one of them.
Our car has this and I rarely use it because I wear glasses to drive. In a mirror, the virtual image you see is distant (even though the mirror itself is close), so my glasses work equally well for looking out the windshield, or looking in the mirror. But with the camera screen, the image is inches away from my eyes so I can’t focus on it. This is a pretty basic principle of optics.
The “interior” of a Bobcat is rather … elemental … compard to that of a modern passenger car. Just sayin’.
Bein’ as Bobcats are the redneck toy of choice, he shoulda used duct tape and maybe some strips torn from a blue plastic tarp.
True.
But it might be possible for the screen to emulate that natural optical behavior. IANA optical-whatever sufficient to know, but it smells fully possible.
(Note, this starts off not addressing the OP but instead answers another post. But it gets to the OP’s question.)
I installed a backup camera (with almost required front view camera, recording etc. that I don’t need).
It was quite a bit of work. Not for the unexperienced at electricals and car trim removal. The screen went over the rear view mirror. Not too distracting since I only had it on for backing up. But it was overly wide and made it tricky for flipping the visors. (Esp. a problem and you want the visor down now after rounding a corner. Had to anticipate and do it ahead of time.)
I ran a wire from the backup lights wire to the rear camera. Don’t recall if that was for power or just signal.
I think the OP would be able to run the wire instead to a switched-power wire instead so it would be on whenever the car is on.
I’d love to have a backup camera on my current daily driver. Just a backup camera with a modest dash-mounted screen. But those aren’t the “norm”.
One problem I had with the previous install was that the screen didn’t work when the interior was hot. Which was a lot. So basically only good for some of winter and nights. Some models now claim they have a big capacitor to avoid battery problems in heat. But this sounds like a different issue. There’s no need for a battery for recording when it only runs when the car is running and I don’t give two cents about recording.
I did a “wireless” system on one of my cars. The camera was part of the rear license plate bracket and was powered by wires to one of my backup lights. The video was sent wirelessly to the receiver mounted on my dash.
This was several years ago and the system was a pretty cheap Amazon purchase. The camera would occasionally lose connection to the display. That got to be too annoying and I removed it.
I have another wireless system on the shelf that is supposedly much better, but I haven’t had time to install yet.
My departed Chevy Bolt had a rear view mirror that you could toggle between a video display and traditional mirror operation. On the surface, it was an excellent deal because you could adjust the field of view to suit your preference, getting a better view of what was traditionally a blind spot.
Unfortunately, as a wearer of glasses with progressive lenses, it just didn’t work. To see what was behind me clearly required I tilt my head back significantly every time I wanted a glance. Just too much refocusing to be done. I turned the feature off after a couple of days trying and gave up on it.
I wasn’t even referring to vision correction. Somehow they use a screen millimeters away from your eyes to present a virtual image that is much farther away. No idea how that works. Vision testers at the DMV do the same thing.
Ah, I get it. Difference in both cases is that you are looking through intervening optics to create the desired effect. Looking at an LCD mirror doesn’t accommodate such an option, unless maybe you set it up like a periscope.
The optics of making things focus at infinity are trivial if you can put the optical element in front of the eye. Think telescopes, binoculars, microscopes. And the same is true of VR goggles. But if the optical element is further away it gets near impossible. The element needs to be much bigger, expensive, and unless the line of sight is directly through the optical axis, distortions are hard to manage. This is likely the real killer.
Making a reverse camera screen in the mirror focus at infinity isn’t impossible, but it would be unwieldy and expensive, and for people with the ability to focus at that distance make for a much worse result.
It is though. At least when we’re talking about a dash mounted screen, it’s much larger than the mirror, it’s brighter than a mirror, it’s more in your field of vision than a mirror and probably the biggest difference is that your rear view mirror probably isn’t fisheyed.
I’m having a hard time finding a video of it, these are thebestones I saw, but IMO, they don’t really do justice to how annoying it is.
Regardless, of how much it bothers anyone, I’m surprised it’s such common issue across brands. My Kia does it, my Honda did it, a VW Atlas I had as a loaner did it and there’s plenty of people online having the same problem.
The solution is clear. The car has no windshield or mirrors at all. Instead, the driver wears a helmet like a fighter pilot and gets 360° vision using cameras all around the car.
