Review: Techalogic CR-1 Rear Camera

NOTE: This review is not compensated and I received no free products or other reward for writing it.

REVIEW: Experience to date so far is (mostly) positive. Although it doesn’t have auto stabilisation it’s a video is still pretty good and I’ve used to to capture video of the Penny-Farthing world’s most famous race: The Knutsford Great Race (2023). I stitched together the helmet camera video with the rear camera video and the result is quite OK.

Although the camera can capture a plate well enough for prosecution purposes, it also acts as a great deterrent averting the need for evidence in the first place. The camera flashes red to alert aggressive drivers to its’ presence and put them on notice they’re being videoed. Cycling with this mounted under the saddle I’ve remarked the number of close-passes from these dangerous idiots has fallen to tiny levels.

In respect to battery life, it’s got an outstanding one: an upwards of 4 hours, but obviously this will vary materially with extremes of cold. And that also means don’t leave it on the bike overnight or it will drop the effective recording time.

Now the downside– and it’s a big one: the saddle mount is crap and has no ratchet-locking mechanism to stop it shifting and taking lovely pictures of the ground. Obviously the suspension on a PF is pretty stiff and will all that jolting, without some other means to stop the camera moving it’s useless. This should have been an obvious shortcoming were the manufacturers themselves cyclists and I’m stunned it got this far without the manufacturer remarking such a fatal flaw.

For a £115 rear-facing cycle camera, it’s not bad and does the business as long as you find some adjunct solution to keep the it from working loose cycling on bumpy roads. Which is now pretty much every road in England…