Garmin Varia Vue

The Garmin Varia Vue is a combined front light and camera, designed to capture footage for use in a subsequent incident report, prosecution or insurance claim. The hardware is excellent, with a high-quality feel and operation. Unfortunately the claim of ‘crystal clear video’ is not backed up by reality, and basically doesn’t work at night – making this a nicely packaged but overall disappointing product, especially at the premium price, unless you’re only wanting something for daytime use, want a combined light and camera, and value Garmin integration.

I’d like to preface this review by stating that I was very much looking forward to seeing what Garmin had to offer here. In the past I’ve challenged the value of its £350 Varia Radar + Light combo – and reading back, I can pretty much summarise my review of the Varia Vue here by posting my follow-up clarification after the Varia RCT715 comments thread blew up.

‘What I would hope comes through is that I have taken a lot of time to assess this product, and that my points are factually correct – eg mediocre resolution camera, mediocre light output, slow/buggy app UX, high price, etc. If you look at each of these individually and then at the [£460] pricetag, I think most people would be challenged to applaud Garmin for what they have built here. As in the review, the only way this is a product anyone other than its mother could love is if your particular niche case called for an all-in-one that was not masterful at any individual aspect of performance’

Apart from changing the price, that’s word for word – and it’s exactly how I feel about the Varia Vue. But I get ahead of myself. Back to the normal review format…

Build & quality

Garmin has – once again – delivered an exceptional hardware result. The Vue feels and looks every bit a premium product – the casing, screws, doors and latches all ooze quality. It’s IPX7 rated, meaning good for 1-metre-deep immersion for 30 minutes.

The out-front mount with its retained spacers and wide-opening hinge sets the bar for others to follow. There’s no 35mm bar option, mind, which is a disappointment as, increasingly, hybrid and commuter bikes are coming with 35mm bars.

The top of the mount is a standard Garmin quarter-turn female to attach your head unit to, the bottom is a Garmin quarter-turn male that fits the GoPro-Garmin female adapter provided in the box.

The top of the Vue is a GoPro two-pronged mount – so will likely fit any GoPro-ready out-front mount you already use.

Disappointingly, you cannot invert the video to run the Vue upside down above a bar bag or similar. There’s a slight difference in the beam pattern when flipped but it’s not StVZO-standard-cutoff-sharp so inversion should be an option.

Charging

Charging is via USB-C out the back. With the right charger or battery pack you can get 17W of input from 9V or 15V USB-C chargers or 9W out of USB-A. On a fast charger, after an hour the battery icon showed full – but was still charging at 6W. After 90 minutes the Vue stopped charging, having gobbled up a measured 16,300mWh. Garmin says the battery is 1800mAh – and at 9V charging, the electrical maths perfectly align the claimed capacity with reality.

You don’t get any percentage reading of the battery, which is annoying as reading the bars on the app is hard, and the tiny side LED either flashes green for ‘good’ or red for ‘less than 60 minutes left’. So it’s hard to tell if you’re fully charged, or about to die.

Light

The light has a constant brightness max of 550 lumens, which is plenty for most riding at most speeds, even in complete darkness. The beam is well-shaped, and there are two large ports either side for visibility by others at intersections; 550 lumens aren’t going to set the road on fire, but with a decent beam (which the Vue has) it’s bright enough for dark, twisty lanes at a decent lick. I’d say the Vue light is comparable with major-brand lights we’ve reviewed here costing around the £50 mark.

Battery life exceeds the specification by a good amount. At 4K resolution (more on that claim later), image stabilisation on and the light on 550 lumens (full), the claimed run-time is 1:15hrs. After an hour it was showing bang on 50%, and at 1:15hrs it was still showing yellow (25%). At 1:30hrs the bar changed to red (15%), and the light dimmed to 140 lumens. It finally died at 1:49hrs – so a whopping 34 minutes past the predicted run-time. Swapping to lower light or camera modes, the ‘exceeded expectations’ comment applies. So chapeau Garmin on the hardware and power front.

A niche use case is to charge the light while riding – which does work. Running the camera at 4K plus EIS plus 550-lumen light draws 10W through the charge port with the battery at 100% – so if your dynamo hub (or more likely battery bank) can sustain that, you should be good for riding long periods in the dark. In daytime, the 600-lumen ‘Daytime Flash’ plus camera draws a meagre 4W. On battery-only, this mode has a spec run-time of five hours – long enough for most folks. For you audax types, topping up the Vue via a battery bank in bursts at cake or Hotel du Hedge stops is a viable option.

Integration’s what you need

The Vue offers integration with select Garmin head units, allowing you to control certain functions from your computer as opposed to your phone/app. This includes automatically adjusting the light brightness depending on your speed and time of day.

It also lets you form a ‘light network’ to power the light on and off along with your Garmin head unit, or when you start/stop an activity. Handy for coffee stops, not having to press three power buttons twice if you’re also running a Varia rear light/radar. It took some faffing, but eventually the network function worked reliably with my ageing Garmin 530 and the lights came on reliably at the desired setting (‘High Visibility’ – ie both flashing). I could also trigger photos and videos from the 530. This I see as a major feature that people who’ve bought into the Garmin ecosystem will like.

> Everything you need to know about bike cameras — how to choose, tips for recording quality footage and what to do if you capture a near miss, close pass or collision

If your head unit detects a crash (‘incident’ in Garminspeak, with no clarity as to what that entails), it will save 15 seconds before and 75 seconds afterward of footage in a protected folder.

There’s an insanely expensive ‘Vault’ service, which for £9.99 per month (or the fabulously discounted £99.99 per year, up front) Garmin will save your footage. For a week. And you have to first download from the Vue and then upload it from the app yourself. I can see exactly zero people wanting to do this.

Varia app

It takes about 10 seconds for the Vue to pair with the Varia app, which lets you configure the Vue, adjust light and camera settings, and review and download footage. This is the same app disappointment it was with the Varia RTL715 – slow and clunky. It took over three *minutes* to download a 10-minute video. You’ll really be wanting to remove the micro SD card to save any video to your PC – especially for reviewing footage to get a licence plate – because you can’t zoom in on the footage taken in the app.

Camera footage

Ah, the footage. Let’s get this out from the start: technically it might be a ‘4K’ sensor – but if you’re expecting modern mobile phone camera or drone quality you’re in for disappointment. Basically: hey Garmin, 2015 called – they want their image quality back.

And if you turn on EIS (‘Electronic Image Stabilisation’) the resolution drops from ‘4K’ – ie 3,840 horizontal pixels – down to 2,688 or ‘3K’. That’s a 30% reduction – and it shows. But then even that lower resolution can look fine, if the camera is able to react quickly and handle light imbalances – especially as the night draws in. Here the Vue really disappoints, with the bloom from oncoming headlights combined with the reflection of its own light off number plates such as to render reading a number at night or in deepening dusk all but impossible.

Now, I appreciate that I am a sample size of n=1. But in my findings, all the dusk and night-time footage I captured was unusable for vehicle identification purposes. I’m caveating the bejesus out of that statement to get ahead of the Varia Vue owners who will no doubt post photos of their success capturing plates in darkness. I don’t doubt that in some circumstances, when everything aligns just so, a clear ID is possible. Just that I and a number of other reviewers across the Internets couldn’t get that lucky.

To be clear here, in decent light it worked OK – over two months of riding I couldn’t find an example where the Vue couldn’t identify plates in daylight. But £460 for a product that you can’t derive full value from for a decent part of the day or year is questionable. If you’re a UK commuter, half the year you’ll need another solution for visual traffic-enfringement-enforcement-grade image capture.

Which brings us to the competition. There’s only one really, and that’s the now-£319 Cycliq Fly12 Sport. The Fly12 maxes at 3K with EIS – the same as the Vue’s 3K setting. The comparisons between the Vue and the Fly12 Sport are much of a muchness – there are ups (price) and downs (no Garmin network, 400 lumens max) but they are roughly comparable where it counts most – image capture.

The one difference would be that a quick troll of reviews shows Fly12 Sport users getting readable results in the dark, some of the time. In Emma’s review, a screenshot shows a plate pretty clearly in darkness – something I couldn’t replicate. It could be that the dimmer Fly12 light actually helps it spot plates better in darkness, as there’s less reflected light to blow out the image. Or she got lucky. The findings of reviewers I trust – Ray Maker, aka DC Rainmaker, Des Yap, aka DesFit, and select others – concur that the Vue is a daylight-only device, if you actually want bulletproof vehicle identification.

Conclusion

So who is the Garmin Varia Vue for? The perfect Vue customer is someone who appreciates quality hardware and is happy to pay a premium for it, hates the idea of a separate light plus camera combo, and wants Garmin integration so there’s one button to push. But doesn’t need video evidence down to licence plate detail in the dark.

There’s no question, £460 is an astounding amount of cash for the brightness and image quality (or lack thereof) on offer, and the value of being fully integrated only goes so far. If the image capture was genuinely 4K (ie with stabilisation) and worked in the dark, I’d be giving this four stars. If Garmin delivered readable night-time images at the pricepoint of the Fly12 Sport, it’d be a knockout five stars. Alas, the perfect or even pretty fabulous all-in-one camera-plus-light eludes the cycling world once again.

Verdict

Very expensive and only captures plates in daylight – but the hardware, battery and Garmin integration are good

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