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Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80

7
£149.99

VERDICT:

7
10
Inexpensive and easy-to-use camera with average, if lacklustre quality, but with a really good light and decent battery life
Good, clear, bright rear light with decent visibility
Easy one-button operation
Fairly compact
Fire and forget: just turn it on and the camera will continuously loop footage
Better looking than its similarly priced competition
Noticeable barrel distortion on lens
Quite prone to glare
1080p footage is not terribly detailed
Weight: 
92g

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Some three years after we reported on this little design hitting Kickstarter, we finally have one in to review. The Tooo Cycling DVR80 is a pretty interesting product that I'm sure will find a market: it's hugely made to a price, and aiming at the bottom/entry point of the bike camera market. To some that will mean too little quality and too few features, while others will be delighted that finally a decent light and rear-facing camera combination is available at this price point.

2024 Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80 - boxed.jpg

I've been wearing a Hövding (the airbag helmet) for the last six years, from a company that no longer exists. I love it. It beeps reassuringly when I put it on, but beyond that I have absolutely no idea if it actually works, and of course, I hope I never have to find out. There's potentially some irony to the fact that, having never seen it work, perhaps it won't when I need it to. Which means It's simultaneously working perfectly, but could equally be completely broken. This is the Schrödinger's cat of bicycle helmet superpositions. (A sentence which surely has never been typed before). This camera is a little like that. Let me tell you why.

It's a 90g, 80-lumen rear light and camera, and there's plenty to like. For a start, the rear light is great. It's clear, piercing, has a decent width of visibility, and the battery last ages, a claimed nine hours or so, though brand new and fully charged I think I got closer to seven and a half, though there are enough variable parameters, like frame-rates, that I didn't feel this was an unreasonable claim.

> Buyer’s Guide: Best rear bike lights

There are four modes to the light: off, steady, and two different speeds of flashing. The clamp that holds it to the saddle is simple, light and effective. It takes two rubber o-rings to secure the light bracket to your seatpost, but comes with four small and two larger ones for more girthy posts, and an adaptor for aero seat tubes/posts. It fit my standard round post well, and gripped well for the entire test period, and as far as I can see, didn't slip.

2024 Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80 - mount.jpg

Locking the light into the bracket is a little bit fiddly, especially as the plastic retaining clip is new and stiff, though I imagine this will bed in a bit. I have to say I found it slightly easier to just pull the entire unit and bracket off by unclipping the rubber o-rings rather than extracting the unit from the bracket. That said, with gloves on, the opposite was true.

If you have a very short length of seatpost protruding from your seat tube (less than 10cm perhaps) you may find it challenging to slide the light onto the rails of the mounting bracket, as there might not be enough room, but this is the only problem I can foresee.

In use

In use, the camera and light were great. You simply push the button once to turn it on, and it'll buzz/vibrate to let you know it's alive, and a blue tally-lamp blinks to confirm recording is active. Go on your way. When you're finished your ride, a longer press turns everything off.

2024 Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80 - 3.jpg

One of the better experiences is the auto-looping function of the camera. It'll take Micro SD cards up to 128GB, and records footage in three-minute chunks until the card is full, and then begins overwriting the oldest files. I seemed to get about 12 minutes of recording time per GB of data, which means that a 128GB card, available for about £10 these days, would give you about 25 hours of recording before it stared looping the recordings. Plenty, I'd say.

2024 Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80 - memort card slot.jpg

It feels well made, no rattles or shakes. It's sturdy and solid, though not heavy. The silicone covers for the USB port and SD card slot are satisfactory, and though the tiny strands of silicone that hold them onto the unit look like they might give way at any moment and break, as they are very fine, they didn't in my testing.

2024 Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80 - charging port.jpg

Video quality

So that leaves one final element: what's the video quality like? The video quality is 1080p at 30 or 60 frames per second. The quality is enough to make out number plates if they're pretty close to you, within 30 feet or so, but you absolutely must use the higher frame rate. However, there's quite a lot of barrel distortion on the lens; it's the same effect as looking through the peep-hole of a door, though of course not so pronounced. It distorts the image, particularly at the edges (observe buildings on the sides of the street seeming to warp and stretch as you pass).

The effect isn't too bad if riding in a straight line on even terrain. It gets rather unpleasant to watch as you turn, though, as all the elements in the picture pass through the distortion, and this effect is compounded by the lack of stabilisation in the camera.

Furthermore, the lens and sensor don't seem to have a ton of dynamic range (the difference in the lightest and darkest points in an image). In footage, you can see the clouds just look bright white, without any texture or detail to them; the highlights are blown out. (This means the camera can't read the detail and just registers it all as white.) In bright daylight, the camera can struggle to resolve details in the brightest parts of the shot, and struggles in the darker parts too.

Additionally, I found it had trouble reading number plates if the angle to the camera caused reflective glare. Premium modern cameras have coatings on the lens to minimise this, which act a little like a polariser, limiting glare and allowing you to see the detail under the reflected light. This may be something the Tooo Cycling camera is doing without. This lens was not great with glare like that reflected off windows and number plates.

> Everything you need to know about bike cameras

One of the first videos I watched back was a two-minute clip on a twisty section of poorly surfaced road, and to be frank, it made me rather nauseated. Some people can handle VR racing simulators and some can't. I confess I'm in the latter camp. Two minutes of watching this backwards-facing video, with bad barrel distortion, over a twisty, poorly surfaced road was quite enough for me, and I genuinely felt a little nausea. (To be fair, this isn't a camera made for 'reviewing footage of happy memories... So it's not as if you're going to gather around with loved ones and view a highlight reel.)

I reviewed the DJI Osmo Action 4 last year, and loved that footage. It's crystal clear from a massive sensor, and very well stabilised. It's 4k, so four times the resolution of 1080p, so in a way this is a deeply unfair comparison, plus the Osmo is twice as expensive, doesn't include a bike light, and is designed solely to capture sharp, stable footage, with a battery life of about 90 minutes. That being said, it's evidence of how we've been spoiled by terrific video quality. GoPro brought 4k footage to the Hero4 over 10 years ago, and even a six-year-old iPhone can do great stabilised 4k.

Hence my Hövding helmet analogy. You're (hopefully) never going to watch the footage; in a way, you hope you never have to find out if it worked or not. There are limitations to this camera. Off-centre images are hard to see, and cars have to be close for their number plates to be visible. The other side of the coin, however, is that if there is an incident, unfortunately cars will probably will be close to the camera. We're obviously not reviewing footage for enjoyment, we're reviewing to see broad brushstrokes things... was the car in the right place? was it the right side of the line? did it go through a red light? did it brake too late...? All these things we'd scan the footage for are probably easily captured.

Value

There's no way to think about this camera divorced from its price. It's made to hit a budget, the very entry point to combined cameras and lights, and it does that well. At retail it's £149.99, though it can be had for as little as £115.

Its obvious competition is the Cycliq range of cameras. The Fly6 Pro that Emily reviewed is two and a bit times the price at retail – £347.98 – and has 4k and Wi-Fi for transfers. Cycliq also has a nice range of companion apps for its family of computers whereas this has nothing.

It's also up against Garmin's mighty Varia line. I haven't used one, but on paper the Garmin outstrips the Tooo Cycling HDR80. As it should for double the price. There are a few flavours of the Varia, but the one that's a light and a camera and a radar, the RCT715, which Mike reviewed last year, also has Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth and ANT+, and comes with a 16GB card and a higher waterproof rating (IPX7). That said, Mike didn't think much to its 1080p camera either...

Neil did rather like the Techalogic CR-1, though, which is an even cheaper offering at £104.95 (and currently £99.95).

Conclusion

The HDR80 is far from a perfect camera, but it must be said, it's not terrible value for money. It's a reasonable image wrapped up in an easy-to-use package. One button on and off, forget about the recordings until you need them, and hopefully you never will.

If it were my money, I'd save it and probably get a Cycliq or maybe a Garmin, but that's also distinctly my buying MO: save up and get something really good. For those less ridiculous than me, there's no denying the Tooo Cycling comes in at a price: the light is great, and it's a 50g and perhaps £75 premium over 'just a light' that will probably capture good enough footage in the unhappy event that you need it.

Verdict

Inexpensive and easy-to-use camera with average, if lacklustre quality, but with a really good light and decent battery life

road.cc test report

Make and model: Tooo Cycling Rear Camera Light Combo - DVR80

Size tested: One Size

Tell us what the product is for and who it's aimed at. What do the manufacturers say about it? How does that compare to your own feelings about it?

This is a low-cost rear light and camera. It's aimed squarely at users who want the safety of a light and security of a hassle-free recording experience, and combination of two devices in one, but don't want or need the radar function of the Garmins, or need the superior quality and price of Cycliq's units.

From Tooo Cycling's UK distributor Freewheel: "The TOOO Cycling DVR80 is a seat post mounted rear full HD camera and 80 lumen light combination designed to film your rides and provides evidence of unfortunate events out on the road. Think of it as your dash cam for your bike. The fully integrated unit will automatically record your ride in glorious full HD (1080p - 60fps) with the added security of a 80 lumen rear light. In an event of an incident out on the road the footage is automatically protected allowing you to submit evidence to insurance companies and law enforcement. The camera sensor provides excellent footage in all light conditions thanks to the top shelf Sony IMX 307 CMOS sensor inside. The DVR80 is simple to operate with one button control meaning you can concentrate on enjoying your ride or commute while unit does its thing! Loop recording ensures you never have to clear your microSD card (not included) when full, the device will simply rewrite over existing footage time and time again. Your footage will always look smooth and silky, the higher frame rate option (60fps) and Sony sensor along with the stable seat post mount ensures great image stabilisation so you know number plate recognition will always be possible. The camera is rated to IPX5 which means it will handle any weather conditions you throw at it, lock down the silicon port covers and the device is actually able to work underwater for short periods of time. The DVR80 utilises a powerful 2500mAh internal battery which is capable of giving you 9.5 hours of recording so we have you covered for the long and short rides."

Tell us some more about the technical aspects of the product?

This is a 1080p camera, with 30 or 60 frames per second recording, a 105-degree lens, and an 80-lumen light. battery life is a claimed 9 hours.

From Freewheel:

Specification:

Recording: Full High Definition 1080p at 60 or 30 frames per second

Battery: 2500mAh internal battery capable of 9.5 hours record time

Charging: USB Type C for fast charging (2.5 hours) and data transfer

Field of View: 105 degree wide angle lens

Format: Loop records in TS and MP4 format

Storage: Footage records onto a microSD card with capacities up to 128GB (approx 2400 minutes of film)

Operation: Fully operated via one simple push button

Rear Light: Integrated 80 lumen red rear light with 3 modes

Mounting: Universal seat post bracket fits on all diameters for quick and easy removal and installation. Aero seat post adaptor included.

Waterproof: IPX5 rated allows you to ride in all weather conditions

Sensor: SONY IMX 307 CMOS

Weight: 90.5 grams

Height: 8.9cm

What's in the box: DVR80 Camera and light combo, Mounting kit including spares, Aero seat post adapter, USB Type C charging cable, Instruction manual and user guide

Please note: The package does not come with a microSD card so this needs to be purchased separately.

Rate the product for quality of construction:
 
8/10

Feels very sturdy, chunky and well made. At 90g it's not much of a burden either.

The only negatives were the silicone/rubber port covering and SD card cover, both of which are a tiny bit fiddly, and secured to the unit by a very very thin piece of material. Neither broke while reviewing, but this seems to be the weak point of construction.

Rate the product for performance:
 
7/10

There's no getting away from the fact this is a unit made to a price. It's 1080p, not 4k. It has no stabilisation and the distortion on the lens is very noticeable. That said, for the money it's not a bad combination of rear recording and a decent light.

Rate the product for durability:
 
7/10

No issues. though the silicone covers feel flimsy.

IPX5 waterproofing is good, but not great (protected from water sprayed with a nozzle, but not submersion-proof).

Rate the product for weight (if applicable)
 
8/10

At 90g it's about twice the weight of an 'average' cycling rear light. Obviously, the benefits of sharing a battery paying dividends here. Two devices for not much weight, pretty impressive.

Rate the product for value:
 
6/10

The performance is not great compared to video quality we've quickly become used to in the last five years or so. Even six-year-old iPhones do 4k and GoPro brought 4k to the Hero4 10 years ago. There is no stabilisation which makes viewing footage, in combination with the barrel distortion of the lens, a far from pleasant experience. But then it's less than half the price of the Cycliq Fly 6 Pro, and half the price of Garmin's Varia RCT715. It's a little more than the Techalogic CR-1 – but it's also a more streamlined design.

Tell us how the product performed overall when used for its designed purpose

It was fine. If you're using it just as a security aid, and you (hopefully) never need to check the footage, then the less time spent reviewing the footage the better. However, the benefits to using it are that it is simple to operate, and the battery seems to last a long time.

There's not much dynamic range to the camera, or clever glare/reflection-cutting coating to the lens, or software correction. This means number plates are sometimes lost through lack of detail, sometimes through reflections and glare, and sometimes through vibrations.

Most of the time, in favourable conditions, it was reliable.

Tell us what you particularly liked about the product

The ease of use. One button on and off, not too many settings to fiddle with, and auto looping recording so you never have to format or empty the card.

Tell us what you particularly disliked about the product

No stabilisation.

Image quality.

Footage can be deeply nauseating to watch when a corner is turned.

How does the price compare to that of similar products in the market, including ones recently tested on road.cc?

Less than half the price of the Cycliq Fly 6 Pro; half the price of Garmin's Varia RCT715; same price as the Techalogic CR-1.

Did you enjoy using the product? Very mixed. It's easy to use, but I hope to never have to review the footage which is awful.

Would you consider buying the product? Maybe

Would you recommend the product to a friend? Maybe, if they wanted the most basic setup.

Use this box to explain your overall score

This is totally a price vs performance debate. The ease of use is great; it's robust in day-to-day use, and the light is fantastic. The image quality, however, is built to a budget, and personally I'd prefer to spend a little more and get better performance. So really, your mileage out of this product is going to depend entirely on where you fall on the price vs performance spectrum: if you're happy with paying less for a more budget option, I'd say it's good overall.

Overall rating: 7/10

About the tester

Age: 45  Height: 177  Weight: 95

I usually ride: Custom titanium gravel   My best bike is:

I've been riding for: Over 20 years  I ride: Most days  I would class myself as: Experienced

I regularly do the following types of riding: commuting, touring, club rides, sportives, general fitness riding, fixed/singlespeed, mtb,

Tom is features and tech writer who's been writing and riding for over 20 years, and has had misadventures on almost every conceivable bike. From single-speeds, to aero race-bikes, gravel bikes, ebikes and mountain bikes, he's a big fan of almost everything that rolls on two wheels. 

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13 comments

Avatar
randonneur | 1 month ago
1 like

Buyer beware.
My use of this product terminated in it not charging anymore. After a lot of use the rubber cap came off and then dirt got in. Soon after the unit stopped working.
Other things it could do better is picture shake, better resolution and a faster frame rate.
Some cars that passed me were so fast I couldn't get a clear definition of their number plate.

Avatar
. . | 1 month ago
1 like

I have two of these (I use one on the front with the red LED turned off and taped up) and think they are great, at least in daylight   Plenty of success at reporting miscreant drivers.

A quirk is it detects if you have mounted it upside-down and automatically inverts the picture.  The trouble is this isn't debounced, so if you hit a bump hard, the video briefly flips

Avatar
Legin | 1 month ago
0 likes

The earlier version of this camera was branded by Chilli-tech and I purchased one of those. Delighted with it, a cracking camera with a good light. If my current version dies a death I'd have this as a replacment.

Avatar
Cycle Happy replied to Legin | 1 month ago
1 like

Really? I don't remember seeing that. Chilli Tech have a newer version than this. I have had one for approximately 6 weeks and have found it to be very good so far, especially for the cost.

https://chilli-tech.com/content/rear-bike-camera-rear-light-for-cycling/

Avatar
Cycle Happy replied to Cycle Happy | 1 month ago
1 like

This is a screenshot in low light and drizzle at approx 15mph. It's pretty decent in my opinion. I have mounted mine on my offside seat stay within the cage area created by my rear Topeak rack and it also allows for me using the drop down side pannier of my Topeak MTX bag. I don't use the side bag often, so find this quite acceptable.

Avatar
Surreyrider replied to Legin | 1 month ago
0 likes

Chilli has branched out with its own version now, selling even cheaper than this. The introductory offer was something like £69 but I wasn't convinced by the seat tube attachments for a D-shaped one.

Avatar
HoarseMann | 1 month ago
3 likes

just a general point on SD cards... whilst you probably can get a 128GB one for a tenner, I would spend a smidge more or go for less capacity, but get a "high endurance" type, ideally a well known brand such as San Disk and from a trusted supplier such as a big name store like Argos (counterfeit SD cards are rife). 
the high endurance cards are designed for heavy continuous writing, such as dash cams and cctv.

Avatar
carlosdsanchez | 1 month ago
2 likes

Magicshine seemee dv rear light+camera combo - £85 or as low as £60 if you want to chance Ali Express. 1080p, no stabilization, but pretty decent footage. Have been impressed with the quality of it so far.

Avatar
OnYerBike replied to carlosdsanchez | 4 weeks ago
0 likes

Unfortunately I can't recommend the Magicshine Seemee DV - I have one and am currently in the process of trying to have it returned and refunded as faulty/not fit for purpose.

The problem I have is that there are significant gaps between "consecutive" video segments - i.e. it will record a ~2 minute video segment, then there's a gap of between 30-50 seconds (based on the time stamps) before the next video segment begins. Clearly such large gaps entirely defeat the point of this sort of camera (I only noticed when I was trying to report a close pass, and realised it wasn't captured on this camera). 

I'm not entirely sure if this is a fault with my specific one, or if this is a design flaw (e.g. if the gap is caused by the time needed to write the previous video file before it begins recording the next one). I'm using the supplied SD card - I did consider replacing it with a better one to see if that fixed the problem, but decided against throwing good money after bad. 

Avatar
lukei1 | 1 month ago
0 likes

Provided it is waterproof then it is a better alternative than Cycliq

Avatar
Secret_squirrel replied to lukei1 | 1 month ago
1 like

Not really.  Lots of people had problems with the early rear lights.  Lots of people didnt.

Avatar
bobbinogs | 1 month ago
2 likes

Ref the other options. The Techalogic CR1 has been discontinued and is now out of stock. A new model is planned in the next month (so early December 2024).

Avatar
Tass Whitby replied to bobbinogs | 1 month ago
2 likes

Still available on Amazon if anyone's keen - link is in the review.

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