ASUS is a company that’s known for its video cards, monitors, notebooks and even phones, but did you know that the Taiwanese brand also makes dashcams? That’s right and today we’re taking a look at the Reco Classic – a full-featured dashcam that has many bells and whistles that its competitors lack.

Before we begin, we are absolutely for dashcams in every car. With the amount of undisciplined drivers in the country, dashcams give you irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing in case of an accident. No more relying on witnesses and third-party accounts in case of accidents, which is how it should be.

The Reco Classic attaches to your car’s windshield via a suction cup mount. Unlike most dashcams in the market today, the Reco Classic comes with a GPS receiver built into the mount that provides GPS location data with playback. ASUS also includes a dashboard mount that has 3M double sided tape adhesive if you don’t want to mount the camera on your windsheild for some reason. The Classic Reco is powered by its own adapter that attaches via the cigarette lighter plug in your car, and has an extra long cable so you can hide the cable around the car when you first install it.

There’s a small display on the back of the camera to help you with proper positioning and to confirm function and to tweak the settings and features of the Reco Classic. Speaking of features, the camera has a bunch of them – aside from GPS location tagging, the Reco Classic also has lane departure warning system (LDWS) that gives you a heads up if it detects that the car is veering away from its lane with highway speeds; forward collision warning system (FCWS) that gives an alert if the camera detects you are approaching an object at an unsafe speed and speed camera detection system, which notifies you of nearby speed traps.

Both the LDWS and FCWS only work in full HD mode and only when the vehicle is travelling above 60 km/h. Both systems use the same aural tone though, so it’s a little hard to discern what the reason for the warning is when it does go off. The speed camera detection system does not work in the Philippines.

The camera can record in full HD if you want to, and the camera can also record in HDR. Audio can be recorded as well, though you can turn it off if you want to. The camera accepts microSD cards and records in 5 minute chunks. The camera will record over the oldest clip in the SD card if it runs out of space. A g-sensor in the camera detects if you’ve been in a collision, and will put the recorded clip into a protected folder for safe keeping.

Video quality is very good – one of our biggest challenges with our heavily tinted car was finding a dashcam that would be able to retain picture quality even with the heavy tint. The Reco Classic performed well in this regard, and the video taken with it clearly show plate numbers and other identifying marks of other vehicles clearly.

What’s nice about the Reco Classic is that with the accompanying media player that can be downloaded off of ASUS’ website, you can also see how fast the car was going as well as its approximate location. If you’ve ever wanted to check on your drivers’ driving habits in detail, this would be a great tool to do it with.

Verdict: A great dashcam with superb image quality

The ASUS Reco Classic is one of the best dashcams that you can buy for your car. Loaded with awesome features, GPS capability and excellent image quality at night even with a heavily tinted windshield, the Reco Classic is well worth the price (Php 5,990) that ASUS is asking for.