Dashcam Mount: Suction cup or adhesive?
When it comes to fixing a dashcam to your windshield, there are two main options: suction cup and adhesive tape. With a suction cup mount, you can attach and move your dashcam at will. With an adhesive mount, the adhesive holds the mount strongly in place and must be replaced if you want to change location. While a suction cup does sound convenient at first, there are multiple reasons BlackVue, like most premium dashcam brands, always stuck(!) with adhesive tape mounts.
Here are the main reasons we believe adhesive mounts are the way to go.
Set and forget:
We believe your time is precious and a good dashcam should not have to be fiddled with daily. With an adhesive mount, once installed and oriented properly in your vehicle, you can forget about your dashcam. No need to reposition or reattach it–forcing you every time to double-check that the angle is right–as would be expected from a suction cup model. If you need to take the dashcam away with you, it is still possible to remove it from its mount. What if you want the possibility to swap the dashcam between your daily driver and your weekend racetrack vehicle? Short of getting a second dascham, you could get a second set of mounts and possibly power/video cables.
Discretion:
Adhesive mounts offer a lower profile, where suction mount need to be relatively much bigger to be effective. Being more discreet, an adhesive mount makes it easier to hide your dashcam behind the rear view mirror. That also means a better view of the road and one fewer source of distraction in your cockpit.
Better image quality:
This can sound out of place but yes, the quality of your dashcam’s mount can directly affect the quality of the recorded footage. Let’s see how adhesive mounts can contribute to more usable and thus valuable videos:
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Limiting vibrations: vibrations can introduce blur which can ruin a video, even one recorded by an otherwise decent dashcam. Suction mounts tend to introduce shakiness or blur in recorded videos. It is inherent to their design, combining multiple parts together, often including a swivel ball and other elements that need to be manually tightened. All these factors contribute to lessen the rigidity of the mount. Adhesive mounts’ strength lies in their simplicity. The fewer moving parts, the tighter it can hold onto your dashcam. The typical mounts found on tubular BlackVue models are made of a single block holding the dashcam tightly in place.
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Limiting reflections: keeping the dashcam closer to the windshield, thus reducing reflections.
Reliability:
It is a fact that suction mounts can fall more easily and cannot keep your dashcam as firmly in place as an adhesive mount. People actually expect a suction cup mount to fall off from time to time. It is not expected to be even semi-permanent so falling off is considered a normal occurrence. This means in case of an accident, the dashcam with a suction cup might fly away, potentially missing important images. On the other hand, if your adhesive mount falls off, we do not consider it a normal occurrence. It could be due to multiple factors but we would recommend to check with our Support team. That’s because we believe your adhesive mount should keep your dashcam in place even in case of moderate to strong shocks and over a long period of time.