Replacing mirrors with cameras

[Ecky]

Originally Posted by LittleBlackDuck

Turning off = no situational awareness. You will be unable to take a glance if you need to make a sudden manoeuver to avoid another twerp.

Not a good idea.

Simon

Given effective placement of the convex mirrors it shouldn't be a problem, I would think?

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by Ecky

Played with some orientations for the screens. The Insight has very little real estate on the dash, and none of them felt particularly great.

The first one doesn't block as much line-of-site as it appears in the picture, but anything that obstructs forward vision probably isn't a good idea:




The second is better, but mounting will be somewhat tricky.






The third is the one I'm favoring as it mimics stock mirror locations and obscures virtually nothing, but the screens may end up very distracting at night. At the very least I'll need to be able to turn them off.

Given your dash layout, I think those are the 3 alternatives - in the 3rd one, if you move them out as far as you can, you would avoid light reflecting off the inside of the windshield at night; and they would be almost in the same place as the stock optical mirrors, so your habits would not have to change much.

In the 1st option, you will want to move then as close to the driver as you can, to avoid said reflection. To have them close enough together to be seen at once is good, so you only have to look in one place to see both sides of the car at once. You may need hoods to shade them from direct sunlight, and/or to block the reflection. Having the monitors close to the driver makes them much more useful to see smaller details.

The 2nd option is the weakest since you have to look at them off axis, and in an odd place; though they might avoid some of the issues with the 1st and the 3rd options.

Here's what I would do: TRY ALL THREE. Install the cameras (even just attaching the cameras to the underside of the stock mirrors and taping the monitors in place. Do you best to positively hold the monitors from falling off while you're driving - that would be dangerous and possibly break them. But try things out before you commit to hard wiring things and putting holes in your dash, etc, is going to be critical to getting things to work.

Do you have side air bags? I would say you want the video mirrors to come on automatically.

[NoD~]

I played around with some really cheap monitors and cameras with my Neon back yonder. I could never get the right angles with the cameras and the monitors just never looked right. I hope you have better success than I did (again, I went cheap cheap cheap just to see if it was even worth upgrading, which may have been a mistake)

One thing I definitely recommend: Keep the passenger one close to the passenger window, rather than closer to your straight vision. Reason why: Turning your head over to see the monitor gets your peripheral vision going and really lets you see more than what's going on in the monitors! Your last pic of them in the far corners of the dash is pretty damn sexy IMO!

[cowmeat]

The issues that I foresee based upon my experience with reversing cameras are:

Total lack of depth perception due to the loss of stereo vision.
Your eye's focusing accommodation time when changing from distance to the much closer monitor surface.
Whiteout when the sun is behind you
Night vision- headlights from behind will tend to destroy any usefulness at night by flooding the camera and lifting the auto brightness level.
Reflection from the card windows.
Sun Glare and night viewing of the monitors. I find they need to be recessed quite a bit to achieve this.

I dunno, I replaced the rear view mirror in my first Insight with a rear view monitor (which my kid still uses these days). I hooked it up through the DVD player and ran power from the rear defroster, and I loved it for two reasons: #1- there's actually a pretty big blind spot on the sides of a G1 Insight, and the wide angle view reduced the blind spot to zero, and #2 - I was able to install a permanent insulated sun shade on the rear window, deflecting the crazy Florida heat away from the IMA battery.

If I had thought of the side view cameras I would have done that on Ron Burgundy, especially since I already had the tiny side mirrors installed.

Pretty cool, Ecky

[cowmeat]

The issues that I foresee based upon my experience with reversing cameras are:

Total lack of depth perception due to the loss of stereo vision.
Your eye's focusing accommodation time when changing from distance to the much closer monitor surface.
Whiteout when the sun is behind you
Night vision- headlights from behind will tend to destroy any usefulness at night by flooding the camera and lifting the auto brightness level.
Reflection from the card windows.
Sun Glare and night viewing of the monitors. I find they need to be recessed quite a bit to achieve this.

I dunno, I replaced the rear view mirror in my first Insight with a rear view monitor (which my kid still uses these days). I hooked it up through the DVD player and ran power from the rear defroster, and I loved it for two reasons: #1- there's actually a pretty big blind spot on the sides of a G1 Insight, and the wide angle view reduced the blind spot to zero, and #2 - I was able to install a permanent insulated sun shade on the rear window, deflecting the crazy Florida heat away from the IMA battery.

If I had thought of the side view cameras I would have done that on Ron Burgundy, especially since I already had the tiny side mirrors installed.

Pretty cool, Ecky

[Ecky]

Duplicate images from my build thread, but here it is, installed:

[stovie]

That's pretty awesome!! Personally I couldn't deal with those because it makes me feel constricted, so I'm wanting to test out some 6-8" dome mirrors for my s10!! I can't even deal with back up cameras because it feels like I'm focusing too much on one thing and will driving I try to take in as much of my surroundings as possible so I don't hurt somebody!!