Most of us do a bit of research before buying anything these days, and dash cams make that harder than they need to. The spec sheets are all resolution and sensor names, and none of it tells you what the camera is actually like to live with.
So here is Beam4, our newest camera, and the one I would put in my own car.
It records the road in 4K and the inside of your car at the same time, and it arrives ready to record. The card and the LTE connection are already in there when you open the box.
Quality recording
Your road-facing camera records in 4K at 30fps through a Sony IMX678 sensor at F1.7, across 146 degrees. That is eight megapixels instead of two, which in practice is the difference between knowing a car was there and being able to read its plate.
The second lens points at the cabin and records 1080p at 30fps across 132 degrees, using an RGB IR sensor with 940nm infrared. You still get a usable picture of the inside of your car after dark, and nobody gets a light in their face while you drive. If you drive people around at night, this is the part worth paying attention to.
Beam4 records three audio channels alongside the video, picking up sound from inside the car and outside it.
Memory and storage
Your Beam4 arrives with a 256GB card already fitted, so there is nothing to buy, nothing to choose, and nothing to set up (with internal hardware supporting high-capacity expansion). Take it out of the box, put it on your windshield, and it records. Anyone who has stood in an electronics aisle trying to work out which write speed a dash cam needs will appreciate that.
Your footage records in a loop, so the oldest gets overwritten first, but clips from an incident are protected, and the loop cannot touch them. With an active LTE Protection Plan, those clips go to the cloud as well.
Ease of use
Mount it on your windshield behind the rearview mirror, plug in the OBD cable that comes in the box, and the app walks you through the rest. That is the whole install.
There is no hardwire kit, and you do not need one, because that same OBD cable keeps your camera powered while you drive and while the car sits parked. So 24/7 protection works the day it arrives, with nothing else to buy and nobody to book.
Aiming is easier than you would expect from a camera with two lenses. Both of them sit in one unit and move together, and the cabin lens already has a 20 degree tilt built into it, so once you have the road view level, your interior is covered.
Parking mode
This is the feature most people buy a dash cam for, and the one they quietly switch off after a fortnight, because leaving a camera running on a parked car raises an obvious question about your battery.
Beam4 reads your car battery directly and manages its own draw against what it actually finds, rather than working to a fixed assumption. Nothing else in our range does this. It is the reason you can leave parking protection on and forget about it.
While you are away, your camera watches for motion and impacts, records what happened, and sends the alert to your phone. With an active plan, you can open a live view and check for yourself.
The LTE Protection Plan
Beam4 keeps recording to its own 256GB with no plan at all, and you can watch and save that footage whenever you like. What the plan buys you is everything that has to reach you when you are nowhere near the car: live view, real-time alerts, vehicle location, cloud backup, and 24/7 parking protection.
Every Beam4 starts with a free 30 day trial and no credit card. After that, it is $9.99 a month, or $95.88 for the year, which works out to $7.99 a month and saves you $23 over paying monthly. Basic is free, so your camera keeps working either way.
Add the Nexar rearview camera later, and your plan covers it. There is no second subscription.
What Beam4 is not
Every camera involves trade-offs, and here are Beam4's.
It only records while powered. Beam4 draws from the OBD connection and will not record unplugged, so it is not the camera for a car you are storing.
It is not weather sealed. This one lives inside, on your windshield.
And your cabin camera is 1080p, not 4K. The road lens carries the resolution. The interior lens was built to see in the dark instead, which I would argue is the more useful job for a camera pointed at your back seat, but it is a trade, and you should know about it.
Is Beam4 for you?
If you carry passengers, especially after dark, this is probably your camera. Same if you park on the street and would rather stop thinking about your battery, or if you have replaced one too many memory cards.
Beam4 is $399.95 at the early bird price, against $499.95 later.
Want to see how it stacks up? Read our Nexar One review, our Beam2 review, or compare the whole range side by side.