Vantrue E360: A 360 Degree Dashcam & Action Cam

I’m a fan of 360 degree dashcams to help provide additional coverage compared to traditional dashcams, and Vantrue has released a new model that caught my eye, the Vantrue E360. It’s a dual fisheye lens camera that’s sort of a cross between a vehicle dash cam and a portable action cam.

I’ve been keeping an eye on its development over the past few months and it’s finally been officially announced this week at SEMA. Let’s take a look at the early key info about the E360.

It’s available for pre-order now and is estimated to start shipping December 5th.

Vantrue E360 Overview & Features

• Dual fisheye lenses front and rear for 360 degree coverage
• 5.2K video (5184*1944P)
• 2K Sony Starvis 2 IMX675 sensors
• Optional 2K rear window dashcam
• HDR
• Buffered parking recording
• 5 GHz WiFi
• GPS
• Supercapacitor
• OTA Updates via the app
• Voice control
• Touch screen LCD
• Doublestick tape quick release mount with power pass-through quick connect
• Optional selfie stick / tripod with internal batteries to power camera on the go

360 Degree Coverage

With the dual front / interior fisheye lenses, the E360 can record all around in every direction. There are also multiple ways to view your captured photos and videos.

This gives you more coverage of not only the front and interior of the car, but also off to the sides.

When you opt for ultrawide fisheye lenses, that compromises your ability to capture details farther away like license plates. This is something that I’d like to test, especially considering the E360 does not have a dedicated front facing camera. It’s advertised as a 5.2K dashcam, but given that it stretches a 2K sensor’s image, I’d expect detail capture to be lower than traditional 2K dashcams. That is the trade-off when going with a fisheye.

360 cams on the windshield are good at recording inside your car, but they struggle to record back behind your car. (Take a closer look at the sample images above.) For that reason, I think it would make sense to get the E360 with the optional rear camera which mounts on your rear window and gives you a much better view behind you.

Finally VanTrue mentions that they offer HDR, and this could be helpful when trying to simultaneously record the sunny road ahead and the shaded passengers in your car, though it’s not clear if that refers to just the front fisheye cameras or also the rear window cam.

Action Camera Mode

The other novel thing is the fact that you can remove it from the powered windshield GPS mount and attach it to a powered selfie stick tripod and walk around with it like an Insta360 or GoPro Max.

This makes it a much more versatile camera when you’re on the go. You obviously will lose parking recording in your car when you do this, but it provides a creative new camera that does something your phone’s camera can’t.

Since there’s no battery in the camera, the optional selfie stick / tripod powers the E360 using its internal battery.

Not everyone will need this extra capability, but it sounds pretty handy if you do.

Everything Else

Looking at the rest of the features and specs, it’s checking all the right boxes.

It uses good quality Sony Starvis 2 sensors, supercapacitors instead of internal batteries which is safer in high heat, HDR for better capturing bright and dark areas, IR LEDs to better capture the cabin at night, multiple different parking recording modes including buffered parking recording, voice control for hands-free control, and OTA updates so you can keep your camera updated using the app.

I still have lots of questions though. How good is it in practice? How good is the video quality? How easy is it to work with the 360 degree footage? Are there any unexpected issues? How well did Vantrue execute? That all remains to be seen, and we’ll have to wait until I have a chance to test and review the dashcam, but so far on paper it’s looking pretty cool.

You can now preorder the Vantrue E360, and it’s also discounted prior to launch.