Filming basically involves converting reality into something digital, a video. So a video is actually a digital version of an event, in the case of a dashcam, for example, a drive or incident. A video - just like a photograph - consists of a lot of ‘pixels’, actually lots of very small dots that make up the video. The video resolution indicates how many pixels the video consists of. The more pixels there are, the more detailed the video is. High-resolution videos are therefore often clearer than low-resolution videos and you can zoom in on them better, for instance.

True 4K, 2K, QuadHD, FullHD, HD Ready, VGA

You get the number of pixels of a video by multiplying the number of horizontal pixels by the number of vertical pixels. So in theory, a huge number of resolutions are possible. Fortunately, because the ‘aspect ratio’ - the ratio of the number of horizontal and vertical pixels - is fixed for each resolution, there are only a limited number of resolutions.

Resolution is denoted by various terms you've probably heard of: True 4K, 2K, FullHD, HD Ready etc. For instance, ‘FullHD’ stands for a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and ‘True 4K’ for a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels.

Higher resolution = better quality?

It is often thought that higher resolution is always better. In principle, it is true that a higher resolution can produce better images, however, in practice this is not always the case. In theory, you can shoot an all-black video in True 4K resolution, but of course you won't see much on that. There are a lot of ‘FullHD’ dashcams on the market with very poor image quality on which you can barely read license plates. It may therefore be that a 720p ‘HD Ready’ video is better than a FullHD video.

That said, high-resolution videos are often better than lower-resolution videos. However, the quality is mainly determined by the image sensor used in combination with the chip or processor. The combination of these two have the most influence on the quality and you can actually see the resolution as a result of these two. With higher resolution videos like True 4K, a better image sensor and processor is often used which automatically makes the quality better as well.

True 4K vs. 4K

There is some confusion surrounding the term ‘4K’, which is often used interchangeably by manufacturers and therefore us. 4K actually means ‘4000’, which stands for the almost four thousand horizontal pixels in videos with a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. Before 4K became an industry standard, a common high resolution was 2880x2160 pixels. This was a lot higher than the common FullHD resolution and this was somewhat mistakenly referred to as ‘4K’.

‘4K’ not a protected term and therefore many manufacturers often still list ‘4K’ as a specification on many dashcams. To avoid confusion somewhat, we also refer to these dashcams as 4K. For dashcams with a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels, we use the term ‘True 4K’ to indicate the highest resolution.