BlackSys App Walkthrough

The video settings are fairly straight forward, one excellent feature of the CH-100B is that you can raise or lower the rear brightness independently of the front video. This is perfect for vehicles with tinted rear windows but do test the settings and review sample footage if you do change it. We find that the default exposure adjustment works quite well.

For the rear view settings you can flip the image left and right so that cars on the right of your vehicle (passenger side in left hand drive countries) will appear on the right rather than the natural way the video is captured. You can also drop the rear view frame rate to 15 fps, the downside being that video may appear choppier and license plates will be harder to pickup, however this can keep file sizes down so you can store more footage on the memory card.

It's a good idea to look over the basic settings before you start using your CH-100B. If you are pairing it to a Cellink B you must switch it to "use external power" and configure the "Standby time till parking mode". When using external power, the camera switches into parking mode based on the G-Sensor, in the sample below if it senses the vehicle hasn't moved in 1 minute, it will switch into parking mode. If you are using external power and leave it at the default 10 seconds setting, it will constantly switch back and forth from always to parking mode whenever you stop at a red light. We recommend using 5 minutes for this setting.

The built-in G sensor is nice to have when you're parked but we often find that the driving mode sensitivity is too high and we get a lot of videos tagged as "events" when in reality nothing happened other than hitting a speed bump. In the sample above we have it set at 1.50G for all 3-axis which will make it much harder to trigger an event tag.

Front and rear security LED are the lights on the front and rear camera that blink, some customers find it wards off onlookers but some don't like the way it draws attention to the camera. Registration number allows you to configure/personalize the timestamp in your video, instead of saying "Blacksys" on the bottom, it can say your name, license plate, etc.

For those using direct hardwire, these settings will be important. Make sure "use external power" is turned off and your red and yellow wires are connected to the appropriate fuses. The timer setting prescribes how long your camera will record for when the car switches off and the accessory fuse becomes inactive. The other setting is for the battery voltage and when the camera will cut off power so that it doesn't drain your battery too low. For the winter months we recommend setting it to 12.2V and for summer months we recommend 12.0V. 11.8V will give you the most recording but may be too low to start the engine on some vehicles. With the timer and voltage settings the power cutoff occurs with whichever comes first, e.g., even if your battery level is sufficient but it's been 12 hours it will still cut off.

GPS will only apply if you have purchased the GPS mount option for the CH-100B. You can use it to set your time zone and change the speed unit displayed. The GPS OSD option will determine whether your speed is displayed in the timestamp of your video.

In additional settings you can change how the memory card space is distributed and other storage options. We like this feature as it means an always mode recording won't get overwritten by a motion detection or event video, (vice-versa). With other cameras such as Blackvue files are simply overwritten based on how old they are and aren't distinguished by the file type. The benefit to this is if your vehicle was hit and the video was tagged as an event, and you didn't catch it right away, you don't have to worry about other parking footage or normal driving footage overwriting it.

Recording length is also configurable but keep in mind even though it's set to 3 minutes, if an event was triggered it will cut that always mode video short and switch it into an event mode. Another neat option is the ability to disable the rear camera in parking mode, if you park in a condo and you're backed up against a wall there's no point activating the rear camera so you could potentially save energy and storage space by disabling it.

Motion Detection on the BlackSys is highly customizable, on the top you have the sensitivity settings which are fairly straight forward. If you find that you are getting too much motion detection video, you can turn down this sensitivity to reduce the number of files you are getting. The other setting is the motion detection area, imagine the grid below as the frame of your video. The green dots specify which parts of the frame will trigger motion detection recording.We like to disable the upper part of the frame as clouds or trees in the distance can even trigger the motion detection.

In audio you can configure the microphone sensitivity and the speaker language/volume. Hourly alarm is a reminder when the clock strikes the next hour (e.g., 3PM, 4PM) it's fairly insignificant and doesn't add much value in our opinion. You can also configure the speaker volume using the up and down arrow on the CH100B.