Recall Rider 4K Safety Camera

The Recall Rider 4K Safety Camera is a good quality system for recording your rides, and the external battery option means that it'll last the distance on all-dayers too.

> Buy now: Recall Rider 4K Safety Camera for £159.99 from Recall

For more options, check out our guide to the best bike cameras.

The Recall Rider 4K is a tube-shaped camera with an alloy body, and feels nicely made. At the front there's the lens, covered by a convex glass housing, and there are power and photo lights on the top.

Behind a screw-on cover at the back there's a micro-SD card slot (a 64GB card is supplied), a charging port, a Wi-Fi button and a photo/video mode switch. With the back cover screwed tight the whole thing is waterproof to 10m, so a wet commute shouldn't unduly worry it.

The camera has a built-in Wi-Fi connection, and that gives you access to a bunch of the settings – recording quality, loop time, timestamp, audio recording and the like – through the Roadcam app, a third-party app that a fair number of cameras use. You can also get a live preview to make sure your camera is set up correctly. You can view files on the camera too, and some basic editing, but you're much better served just taking the card out and doing that on a laptop. The app is functional, and not really much more than that, but aside from setting the camera up you probably won't need it.

Recall Rider 4K: Mounting and accessories

This is a camera designed to be used as a bar cam, a helmet cam or a horse-rider cam and because of that you get a lot of mounting options and accessories.

The camera has an internal battery that lasts for an hour or so but you also get an external battery pack and a replacement end cap with a long USB lead. With these fitted, Recall claims a run-time of over seven hours, and I can confirm that's accurate: I got nearly eight, four of which were the camera pointing at the wall of my shed after I forgot to turn it off. If you want to go longer, you'll just need a bigger battery than the 5,000mAh one supplied.

You can also charge the internal battery with the lead/cap – and you'll need to, unless you've squirrelled away a mini-USB lead from a decade hence*. Who uses that standard anymore? Recall may have chosen it because it's a nice chunky plug which makes getting everything lined up a bit easier. But it's still a bit of an odd choice; USB-C would be better for lead compatibility. And charge times. The camera turns itself on and starts recording every time you plug it in, either to the battery or to the wall, which is a bit annoying when you're trying to charge it.

I mostly used the external battery, and put it in a Tailfin top tube bag. You could also use a frame bag; Recall supplies one designed to fit in the rear of your front triangle but it's the worst bit of the kit – badly made and not waterproof. It assumes your top tube and seat tube meet at right angles, too, which they don't.

There's also a waist pack which is more for horse riders, although it could be useful if you're running the camera on your helmet with the battery attached. That's a much nicer bit of kit, although the waterproof port is designed for a headphone jack, and the USB lead won't go through it, so that has to poke out of the zip.

There are various mounting options: straps for ventilated and solid-shell helmets, sticky GoPro style mounts, and a bar mount in two parts.

The bar mount works after a fashion, but it's designed for small-diameter flat bars and won't work on a standard drop bar. in the end I stuck one of the action cam mounts to the bottom of my out-front mount and hung the camera from there, where it's out of the way.

Whatever your setup, you should be able to sort something that works from the bits you get, although it has to be said that none of the bike-mounting options is better than okay, really. Both the GoPro-style mount and the bar mount are difficult to lock out, and the camera tends to wander a bit from centre. Luckily the 170-degree view from the lens makes that less of an issue.

I also used the camera as a helmet cam without the external battery, on shorter rides. Personally I think it's on the heavy side for a helmet camera, probably not helped by the fact that my camera mount on my helmet is at the front, which means the camera tends to tip the helmet down a bit. Stuck right on the top it would probably work better.

I'm not a fan of the look, but you can point the camera at things you want to record more easily, and your body acts as a shock absorber which makes the footage less jumpy. There's no image stabilisation in the camera itself, so on rougher roads the shake is substantial if you mount it to the bar. There's a G-sensor inside the camera that can be set to move files and protect them if it detects an incident, but my experience was that riding along any normal knackered UK road was basically an incident, so it wasn't especially useful.

Recall Rider 4K: Picture quality

The Recall Rider 4K packs a Novatek 96670 Chipset, and records at a maximum of 4K (3840 x2160) at 30 frames per second. There's a 60fps option at 1080p (1920x1080) too.

First things first: despite the fact that Recall claims the camera will capture 'stunning footage of your riding experiences to share with family, friends, or social media', you're not really going to get footage out of this camera that you're going to want to compile into cool ride vids. The quality isn't up there with the likes of a GoPro, or even a mid-range action camera, and it probably won't be as good as your phone either. That's moot, to a large extent: I found that recording in 4K, the camera, for the most part, did exactly what you need a bike camera like this to do, in the most obvious use case: capture legible number plates if you find yourself in any kind of incident.

Normally I'll stick a camera on the bike and suddenly everyone will drive like an angel around me. Not this time though! Literally the first time I switched it on there was this chump undertaking me at about 20mph as I slowed to turn right, leaving about 30cm between his van and my bar...

...and then a quarter of an hour later this idiot slowed to close pass me and his passenger sprayed me with water for good measure.

I reported these incidents, so we'll see what comes of that. In both cases the number plates were clearly visible in the footage.

> 10 tips for submitting good quality camera evidence to police

In daylight the picture is very decent, and even pointing directly into the sun the lens doesn't get swamped. When Josh reviewed Recall's dual-lens camera he had problems with the exposure, but it wasn't an issue here, probably thanks to the higher-quality internals.

After dark, in street-lit areas, the camera is pretty good: you get more shaky footage but normally you can read number plates of passing vehicles just fine (nothing wrong with this pass, by the way).

Out of town you're more dependent on what light you're bringing to the party, but even so the picture is okay: this is the view illuminated by a not-especially-bright light (Cateye AMPP 500) not even on high beam.

The darker it is, the less likely you'll get a hit on every plate, but the Recall Rider does a pretty good job all told. In most conditions, and especially in lit areas, you'll be fine.

The Recall Rider has a photo mode too: hit the red button on top and it'll take a snap. The pics aren't really very good, and obviously you'd need to remember to immediately hit the button if there was an incident, and the police wouldn't be interested in a still image anyway, so I'm not sure there's an awful lot of point having it for the main use case of the camera. It's there, though.

Recall Rider 4K: Value and overall

At £160 the Recall Rider 4K is reasonable value: it's a well-made camera, the picture is as good as you need it to be, and you get a lot of bits with it including a battery pack for a long run-time.

Recall's Rider Dual isn't much more, but it's a step down in terms of quality. I liked Innovv's K6 system which marries a 2K front camera with a 1080p rear, but that's a fair bit pricier than this one that just looks forward, and the picture out of the Recall Rider is a bit better.

Action cameras such as the DJI Osmo Action 4 easily trump units like these on picture quality, but they're expensive and the battery life isn't great for longer rides.

Overall, if you're looking for a camera to record rides because you want actionable footage if things happen, then the Recall Rider 4K is a good option. It's not perfect, but it'll certainly do that job.

*I mean, obviously I have about ten

> Buy now: Recall Rider 4K Safety Camera for £159.99 from Recall

Verdict

Good quality camera for dashcam-style recording of ride incidents