DVR Stealth MFU 680 — the pros and cons of this device

This is a rule to which, of course, there are excep­tions. An incon­spic­u­ous gad­get with the telling name Stealth MFU 680 is not infe­ri­or to its com­peti­tors in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty and cost, how­ev­er, it is quite small and, if desired, it can be safe­ly placed behind the inte­ri­or rear-view mir­ror. How did the devel­op­ers achieve such com­pact­ness, and what did it cost them? — in our review.

Content

About Stealth MFU 680

Specifications

Completion had to sacrifice for the sake of … what?

Obvi­ous­ly, the cost of devel­op­ing a DVR that stands out from oth­er offers on the mar­ket needs to be increased, and in order to remain with­in the com­pet­i­tive price seg­ment, the man­u­fac­tur­er had to make com­pro­mis­es.

The equip­ment of the device became such a “vic­tim” — it is poor, there is no oth­er term to pick up.

Inside the bright and promis­ing box: the recorder itself with a radar detec­tor, a brack­et for mount­ing the device on the wind­shield, a pow­er cable from the on-board net­work and a USB cable — that’s it. At the same time, if sud­den­ly your suc­tion cup becomes loose or fails, you won’t be able to buy the same one in a near­by auto shop, but more on that below …

There are no ques­tions about the build qual­i­ty. This is real­ly good plas­tic, with glossy inserts in the places where the receiv­ing anten­nas of the detec­tors are installed and a large widescreen screen with a diag­o­nal of 2.7 inch­es. The device is made in strict black col­or, all con­trol but­tons are placed on the front side: three each — on the right and on the left. Press­ing is car­ried out gen­tly and at the same time clear­ly, with a pleas­ant return. There is a net­work of ven­ti­la­tion holes next to the lens for addi­tion­al cool­ing of the gad­get fill­ing.

Ergonomics should be taken seriously

The Stealth MFU 680 video recorder belongs to the cat­e­go­ry of devices that can be used imme­di­ate­ly after leav­ing the store, as they say, “out of the box”. All the nec­es­sary pre­sets are done, you just need to insert a mem­o­ry card into the slot.

But there are some obvi­ous down­sides as well.

• For exam­ple, when con­nect­ing, you should be care­ful and con­nect the pow­er cable direct­ly to the brack­et on the glass, and not to the case. Oth­er­wise, the portable GPS-receiv­er will not be pow­ered and your gad­get will lose one of the three func­tions assigned to it.
• Sec­ond­ly, the same receiv­er, although it made it pos­si­ble to reduce the dimen­sions of the main unit, now does not allow the screen to be rotat­ed 360/180 degrees in the azimuthal plane — only slight devi­a­tions from the cen­tral posi­tion.
• And final­ly, there is a cer­tain dis­so­nance between the desire of the devel­op­ers to make the recorder so small that it could be installed behind a mir­ror and the fact that infor­ma­tion about the type of radar com­plex and the dis­tance to it is dis­played on the screen — then it will not be vis­i­ble.

Full HD quality always!

Our hero is one of the few over­sized devices that are capa­ble of Full HD at 30 fps and HD at 60 FPS. The max­i­mum res­o­lu­tion is 2560x1080 pix­els, and in pho­tog­ra­phy mode — 1920x1080 pix­els.

Record­ing is car­ried out in a cycle, and the dura­tion of the video can be select­ed in the menu. It is con­ve­nient that the MP4 / H.264 video codec is used — there is no need to install addi­tion­al soft­ware to view files on a lap­top or tablet.

Performance from Ambarella 7 Series

The device, as expect­ed, uses the Ambarel­la A7LA50D proces­sor — this is an excel­lent solu­tion for small-sized devices, as it per­fect­ly mates with the OmniVi­sion 1/3” 4 mil­lion pix­el sen­sor. In addi­tion, Stealth MFU 680 sup­ports microSD mem­o­ry cards up to 128 GB, which is rare even for flag­ship gad­gets.

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant “plus” in the DVR’s pig­gy bank is the HDR shoot­ing mode, which allows you to present the pic­ture as a super­po­si­tion of two images with dif­fer­ent fil­ter­ing com­po­nents — this allows you to get rid of bright glare and make night shoot­ing clear­er and more con­trast.

The anti-radar works out for 5+

The recorder menu can be con­di­tion­al­ly divid­ed into 2 large blocks: Video Set­tings and Radar Set­tings, the sec­ond part is the most detailed. The detec­tors of laser radi­a­tion and radio bands are spa­tial­ly sep­a­rat­ed and pro­vide detec­tion of road mea­sur­ing sys­tems sev­er­al tens of meters before the direc­tion find­ing of the car, which allows you to quick­ly adjust the speed lim­it.

Detec­tion of K, Ka, Ku and X‑band radars is pos­si­ble even from the back of the car, when irra­di­at­ed “in the back”. Among the com­plex­es that are equal­ly well detect­ed both on the high­way and in the metrop­o­lis mode: Strel­ka, Robot, Iskra, Cor­don, Chris.

Good and reliable DVR

There is noth­ing strange in the fact that sales vol­umes of the Stealth MFU 680 have not decreased so far, although the release of the device took place almost a year ago. Yes, the gad­get has obvi­ous blun­ders and short­com­ings, but there are incom­pa­ra­bly few­er of them than the “plus­es”. The most com­plete func­tion­al­i­ty, a bal­anced approach to devel­op­ment, pleas­ant design and qual­i­ty are the key to suc­cess­ful pro­mo­tion of the DVR on the mar­ket. The cost of such a gad­get in a retail net­work will not dri­ve any poten­tial buy­er crazy — buy­ing 3 devices for the price of one is hard to refuse such an offer. If you want to have a high-qual­i­ty Full HD pic­ture and receive infor­ma­tion about the installed radars on the road with a 99.9% prob­a­bil­i­ty, the Stealth MFU 680 is per­fect for this!

pros

• Attrac­tive price
• 360 degree detec­tion
• Sup­port 128GB mem­o­ry cards
• HDMI con­nec­tor
• Full HD qual­i­ty
• HDR shoot­ing mode

Minuses

• poor equip­ment
• Ill-con­ceived ergonom­ics
• Remote GPS mod­ule