Botslab G980H Multi Channel Review

Introduction

The Botslab G980H dash camera comes in two flavours: the two-channel G980H Pro, and the Botslab G980H Multi Channel tested here. Its stand-out feature is undoubtedly the fact that it comes with four cameras, designed to cover every angle of what’s happening on the road. But while the front films at up to 4K, the side and rear cameras are limited to 1080P.

Perhaps the next most remarkable feature is this camera’s price. I did the bulk of my testing before researching what it cost, and was more than a little surprised to find it was well under £200. That’s really impressive value for a four-camera dash cam with a colour touch screen, especially since it’s supplied with a 128GB MicroSD card – you usually get nothing, or 64GB if you’re lucky.

There are a couple of things missing, however. While the camera warns you to take a break, it doesn’t offer other driver aids, such as a lane-change warning or a heads-up about stopping or starting traffic. Let’s get into the details.

Design and features

• Neat, bar-shaped design
• Excellent touchscreen
• No significant driver aids

Dash cam manufacturers stick with a few trusted design formats for their devices. The Botslab G980H Multi Channel uses a bar-shaped design, slung fairly close to its windscreen mount. It’s a little like the Road Angel Halo Ultra, although not quite so compact.

While the front-facing camera is onboard, the two side cameras come in pods that mount on either end of the main unit. They’re held in place by two magnets, cleverly polarised to prevent you from fitting them the wrong way around. The rear cam connects via cable to a port in the windscreen mount, where you’ll also hook up the power cable.

Disappointingly, you can’t unhook the Botslab 980H from its mount, but it’s supplied with electrostatic stickers that make it easy to remove or reposition to get things just so. Still, it pays to think carefully about where you’ll put it, and check you’ll have room to connect up the cables.

The front camera is on a brilliant stalk that supports a few degrees of movement in every axis, including bank (roll), so provided you’re broadly happy with the camera body position, you’ll have an unusual amount of freedom to tweak its view. Another plus is that this camera’s comparatively shallow depth let me mount it directly below my car’s mirror binnacle, where it barely obstructed my or my passenger’s forward view – I usually have to consign dash cams to the passenger side of my windscreen’s centre line.

This dash cam’s side cameras can pivot through slightly more than ninety degrees, from directly sideways, through to fully rear-facing. Each has a 120-degree field of view, so placed dead sideways, you can, in theory, cover the entire perimeter of your car – in reality, the car’s B and C pillars and its headlining will get in the way. If the cabin’s your priority, you can twist the cameras further back – it’s possible to cover the whole cabin and some of the side view, while there’s infrared lighting to make sure the interior is visible at night.

The rear camera is a standard bullet-shaped device. One potential irritation is that it has a green power LED that can’t be switched off, but as it’s side-facing, I didn’t notice it, even at night.

The final physical component of note is the supplied cigarette-style power adaptor. This feeds the dash cam via a moulded cable and, while there is a single USB-A slot, it’s rated only at 12W – not much help for fast-charging a smartphone.

Fit the Botslab 980H Multi Channel, turn on your ignition and you’ll get a live view, which gives you the opportunity to fine-tune each camera’s position. This dash cam’s touchscreen can be a little sluggish during the first 15 seconds or so while it – presumably – finishes background boot tasks, but it’s brilliant after that. It’s probably the most responsive dash cam touchscreen I’ve used, supporting tap and swipe gestures without lag or confusion. The menu system’s not perfect, but it’s a good effort for a dash cam.

You can access this camera’s recordings from its screen, by removing its SD card and browsing in a computer, or via the Botslab app. This connects via Wi-Fi, and gives you access to recordings and a broad range of settings.

It’s worth mentioning that, while it’s great to get a 128GB card in the box, this won’t last as long as you might expect. At the default 3K front, and 1080P elsewhere resolution, the camera saves around 330MB of data each minute. Step the front up to 4K and it’s around 400MB – enough to fill the card in just over five hours, which isn’t enough if you drive reasonably long distances. There’s a button on the dashcam underside to protect recordings, but if you forget to use it after an incident, you risk losing the footage more quickly than you might expect.

You won’t find any useful driver aids on the Botslab G980H Multi Channel. It does have a driver fatigue warning, but this is a simple suggestion to stop driving after a configurable amount of time – it’s not based on how you’re actually behaving. This dash cam can’t warn you if you’re drifting out of your lane, or if the traffic in front sets off or suddenly stops. In my experience, modern cars are far better at these things anyway, with the added advantage that they can help steer or brake you out of trouble, but this isn’t the right dash cam if you are looking for driving help.

Performance and video quality

• Disappointing video quality
• Very poor side and rear views at night
• Good cabin recording

This feels like a nicely designed dash cam, so it’s a shame that it didn’t live up to its promise. It was generally easy to live with, obstructing very little of the windscreen, but its G-sensor was one of the most sensitive I’ve encountered. It triggered multiple emergency recordings – designed to prevent crashes and bumps being overwritten – on Brighton’s bumpy roads. While that’s not unusual, turning the sensitivity right down didn’t stop them. Eventually, I turned the feature off.

More significantly, I was disappointed by the all-round video quality. I rarely expect greatness from rear-facing cameras, but this is a particularly poor one. It wasn’t especially sharp during the day, with individual frames often suffering from a degree of compression artefacts that could obscure some details. It also failed to expose dingy corners, even in good light.

At night, it was almost hopeless, with poorly resolved videos under streetlight, and a curious colour balance problem in pitch darkness that saw it reproduce my high-level brake light as green. Even in the brightly lit city, it was impossible to pick out details such as number plates, while reflections and light sources streaked by in a near-hallucinogenic dreamtime.

Sadly, it was much the same story for the side cameras. These did seem slightly better, and they captured perfectly good cabin footage, even at night.

However, they couldn’t always resolve sharp details outside the car – a fairly common problem for side cameras, given the speed at which the roadside moves past relative to the frame.

Despite all this, I should point out that the rear and side cameras would do enough to establish what happened in the vast majority of accidents, even if the details might not be crystal clear.

Unfortunately, the Botslap G980H Multi Channel’s front camera doesn’t compare especially well, either. It’s certainly not bad, recording reasonable footage in the day, at night, and in low-light situations, but it’s not as crisply resolved as the best 4K dash cams I’ve tested, notably including the Viofo A329.

While absolute video quality isn’t necessarily the goal of a dash cam, sharp individual frames are especially important – they may make the difference between you recording a passing number plate or not. This camera wasn’t great during the day, and while video footage at night was fairly good, it was typically unable to resolve number plates, which were either washed out by my headlights or too blurred to be readable.

It’s pretty easy to navigate the Botslab app, where you can view recorded videos.

It’s not great for browsing recordings, though, as there’s no timeline, just a huge list of films sorted by date and time. Still, it lets you complete basic edits and share videos – although remember that doing so publicly may be an offence in some European countries.

Should you buy it?

FAQs