I've had this unit for a couple of months now. It works amazingly well and has materially added to the safety of my and my wife's driving.

First, installation is not exactly "easy" as the manufacturer says. The most intricate part of the install is attaching the camera to the back of the car. You might be able to use the screws on your license plate, but when I tried that the camera covered too much of the license plate. So I drilled two holes just above the plate. If you do this, buy some grommets to go into the holes you drill to create a seal between the camera strap and the trunk to eliminate water entry. I was able to route the camera wire up behind the license plate light to get it into the trunk. You may need to drill a third hole. There are not screws in the package, so you'll have to go get your own, and any other hardware for the job (e.g., wire, wire nuts).

When running the wires through the trunk lid, I discovered that the wire harness in the car was too short, so I had to splice in a bit of wire to get enough length to join it to the camera harness. So you might want to have a little wire and wire nuts on hand for that purpose.

Running the wire through the trunk and car wasn't a problem for me. Your mileage may vary. The only issue I came across was that I needed to run the wire across the A pillar air bag. I left enough slack so that when/if the bag activates it will have no problem opening. And remember to achieve a good ground. I didn't, and the resulting backup video was in and out, with lines across and generally poor quality.

As for its operation, the mirror unit (which attaches easily and securely over the existing mirror) is larger than the OEM mirror, which is nice. The mirror is not as bright as the OEM one, but it's not an issue for us. Video quality is nothing to write home about, but the point of the device is to let you clearly see what's behind you, and that it does very well, day or night. The mirror video suffers in bright light, so sometimes you need to move your head or the mirror to get a good look behind you. But that is to be expected.

Overall we're really enjoying price/quality ratio of this backup camera, but installation is not for the less mechanically inclined among us.

This would be my second review as Amazon doesn't' want me posting negative things about this unit. I'll simply say this. I like the idea of having this built into a mirror display, if it worked when I got it. There are no instructions that come with it but if you know a little about how these things are installed that shouldn't be a problem. Pretty self explanatory. I had issues with the one I purchased as in it never worked. I did get one eventually from a different source as I had communication issues with the vendor. The one I did get is identical to this and works ok. I would give it 4 stars but the lack of instructions and inconsistency of working or not knocks it down.

INSTALLATION:
I purchased this for my car and I will go through the steps that I went to install it. (install 2004 Pontiac Grand Am SE1 V6). First I drilled a few holes (behind the licence plate and on inner part of truck, both are not visible). These holes needed to be big enough to fish through the wires from the camera into the trunk area. (about 3/4 - 1 inch) Next I poked an extra wire through the two holes to make sure that they would fit. Then I tied the wires for the camera onto the end of the extra wire and pulled them through. I screwed a screw into a hole behind the felt liner in the trunk where it would not be visable and grounded the camera onto it. After that, I ran the wires through the car to the front of the car underneath the trim where it is all invisible. Then I hooked up the screen/mirror (which clipped directly onto the rear-view mirror). Finally, I got power by hooking the power into the lower reverse lights in my Grand Am. There were about half a dozen wires coming out of the light. I hooked the power wire to one of the light green wires. Finally, I started my car, put my e-brake on, and put my car in reverse to test it. It worked! The monitor itself has three buttons that are supposed to adjust brightness, saturation, etc of the screen, but I found that there was little difference in all of the settings between the 0% and 100% spots. In all, the installation took me about 3-4 hours, with the bulk trying to figure out how to get the wires into the inside of the trunk from the license plate.

CONS:
-Poor quality screen (flickers, blanks out, low resolution, washes out in bright sunlight)
-The camera mounts over license plate, which looks a little tacky, but works well and you do not have to drill mounts into your bumper for it.
-Hiding the wires can be a pain.
-Installation takes some electrical knowledge and time.

PROS:
-Works as advertised (if wired correctly into reverse light wire)
-Is handy to back up to close proximity to something without hitting it. (red line starts at about 2 feet so I usually back to there.)
-Works well in night.
-Looks like a professional installation instead of a dash-mounted screen.

CONCLUSION:
This product works as advertised, but there are some glitches in it that you have to overlook when considering the price. If you want a cheap backup camera, this is it and that it what you will get, if you want a nice, professional back up camera, look at higher prices. I do like this product and would purchase it again if I had the opportunity. If my review was insightful and helped you in your purchasing decision, please give it a "thumbs up" so that I can continue to create professional reviews.

Please give me a "thumbs up" if my review was helpful in helping you decide what product to get. This was purchased with money out of my pocket, and I was not paid or given anything to review this product. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

After a month of using this camera, I have found out why it is so cheap... The reverse light has lines that vibrate over the screen. I am not sure if they are from it refreshing or what, but they look cheap. Also, there have been times that I have reversed and the screen flickered or turned off for a couple seconds when I was still in reverse, I dont know what causes it. It could be from loose connectors, but I am not too thrilled to have to dig into the project again... Still recommend for the price, but YOU DO GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR..

I bought this dash cam, If there is a traffic accident, can avoid many unnecessary troubles I could record the vehicle information in time. After comparison, I chose this equipment, I think it has the following advantages:
It is mounted directly on the rearview mirror and is basically not required for installation. It is also very simple to take down.
It's screen is very large and expands my vision of rearview mirror. The mirror image is very clear when it was used as a rearview mirror.
It's touch-screen operation is very convenient, and its screen allows the drivers to easily see the content on the screen, and they can easily click on the screen to operate. Just imagine that it would be crazy to click on the smaller buttons on a small 2-inch device.
It's shooting effect is very good, the front camera can be stable shooting. PAL and NTSC system,16:9 display format and 480 x 272 pixels. Record the two lanes of the car around the car from a rear-view mirror.
It"˜s rear view camera is very useful, it is very helpful for reversing. This rear-view camera can help the driver observe the real scene of the vehicle's tail and avoid accidents.

It does what it's supposed to do an shows you an image of what is behind you. It's not exceptionally great, but not terrible either. It's mediocre. The image is clear and crisp, the night vision is pretty good as well. However, the construction is poor and I expect it's going to get filled with water the first rain I get. I tried to prevent this by sealing up some of the cracks, we'll see if it works or not. All of the wires are to short for an extended cab truck, except the single power wire that you hook into the reverse lights at the camera itself. It's not long enough to go across the roof and down the pillar to get to power under the dash for the display from the mirror. The video cable is also not long enough to make it all the way down the truck and up the pillar to the mirror. I had to go buy a 25 foot video cable which had about 3 feet to spare, and extend the power cables a bit.

Where this camera really fails at is the field of view. It's pretty terrible. To get the guide lines to seem like they are going in the right direction and not pointing up into the sky the camera has to be angled down by a lot, which in itself isn't terrible but with the low field of view it means you don't have very much height visibility in the camera. Not a big deal under normal situations but if you have a trailer hooked up, you probably won't be able to see over and past the trailer to see where it's going like you can do with a factory backup camera. The width of the field of view is also poor.

You can see in the attached photo how bad the field of view is. That AC unit is about 8 feet behind the truck and it's only about 3 feet tall. Also to note, I have a hitch on the truck and even at the angle the camera is at you can't see the hitch. The hitch is probably sticking out from the back of the truck close to another foot. So, with the poor field of view I'd be worried about not seeing something immediately behind the truck on the ground.