Dash cams have become an invaluable tool for motorists of all sorts, as it gives you a real-time visual record of any incidents that happen on the road. If you spend as much time riding a bicycle as other people do driving a car, then it makes sense you want something similar to a dash cam for your bike. That’s exactly what you get with the Garmin Varia Vue Headlight Camera.
Instead of giving you a dedicated handlebar camera for recording road incidents like a dash cam, they built the camera into an erstwhile standard-looking bike headlight. That way, you get yourself the same handy functions as a dash cam, without having to throw in a whole load of extra gear on the bike.
The Garmin Varia Vue Headlight Camera mounts to the handlebar like any standard bike headlight, allowing it to easily illuminate the road when you’re riding in low light situations. It’s a pretty capable headlight, too, coming with up to 600 lumens of brightness to shine a really strong light at the road ahead, with the outfit claiming up to a full mile of visibility. There are five light modes (high, medium, low, night flash, and day flash), so you can choose the kind of lighting you need for each situation, as well as auto-brightness control that can adjust to your speed and the prevailing light conditions. It uses a cutoff beam, by the way, which minimizes the light intensity above the cutoff line to minimize distracting any oncoming traffic.
Do note, the full 600 lumens is only available during day flash mode. At high, you only get 550 lumens maximum, which is pretty par for the course when it comes to lighting products (even flashlights work the same way). Since it’s designed for use on a bike, it has an IPX7 rating, ensuring you can safely use it for illumination when you’re riding in rainy conditions.
The Garmin Varia Vue Headlight Camera is equipped with a 4K camera that can record in 4K/30fps, 1440p/30fps, and 1080p/60fps. By default, the camera runs continuously, but only saves footage before, during, and after detected incidents. That means, it’s not likely to record something funny you saw on the road (unless, of course, you intentionally hit something to prompt it to record). If you use the outfit’s Varia rearview radar, it can also use that as an additional sensor for detecting potential incidents. There’s a built-in microphone, too, so you have clear audio to go with your 4K ride footage, ensuring you get a clearer context for everything that happens in the footage.
You can control detailed settings on the fly for both the headlight and the 4K camera from the Varia smartphone app, although you can also control both from any compatible Garmin cycling computer, in case you use them. The camera doesn’t have built-in storage, by the way, so you will need to add a microSD card (up to 512GB) for a place to store your recordings.
The Garmin Varia Vue Headlight Camera is available now, priced at $549.99.
