Back in my home country these toys are quite popular - good for arguing with police and in case of accidents.
I know that here in Switzerland people are obsessed with privacy - just to mention google street.
So I'm a little bit worried with a risk of being stopped by police and questioned about strange device located behind windshield. Is these cameras are illegal in Switzerland?
Ditto. Drop by the Introductions forum and say hello to the crowd.
And yeah, forget about the cops. There are no "privacy" concerns for normal people walking down the street. If you want to have 20 cameras for your private use inside your car, you're free to do it. It IS a free country here as well. As long as they don't make any noise on Sundays you're cool.
And the fact that only 1% of the country is ex-directory, you can reverse look up car registrations online, look up your neighbour's tax returns, oh and unless you put your name on your letterbox you don't get any post. Not much of an obsession as I see it...
By the way, driving with cam for almost one month and almost forgot about its presence. But first days it was really attracting dangerous road situations never happening with me before here in CH.
First time young lady joining the roundabout forgot to give me a way when I was circling there. Was nice to see when the man siting on the passenger seat beside her was unloading on her all kinds of expressions.
Second time really crazy french guy driving without right side-view mirror was changing the lane right to the left lane where I was driving. This time young lady siting on the passenger seat was looking on me like I was a stupid idiot when I horned and flashed them.
The clever ones are the ones that are continuously recording to RAM and when you hit a button, they write the last few minutes to Flash.
This way, if you see something happen, you press the button and everything that the camera recorded in the previous few minutes is saved for prosperity and for uploading to You-Tube.
In my cam there is "save" button which when pressed would not allow to overwrite the file containing current video fragment. Good for accidents I guess.
This is good to know---as many people might know, there's quite the debate in the US whether it is legal or people have the right to film police officers. If you check out youtube, there's tons of videos where the po-po are acting...how you say....unprofessionally. Also many stories of legal action against people for making such videos.
www.dealextreme.com has numerous low cost cameras available for anyone not wanting to spend a great deal on their first unit. A proper h264 unit would be best. Best to order at least 200 chf worth of stuff though, as your package will probably be penalised at customs, as this company doesn't seem to like invoicing the parcels properly. I think they are also out of favour as they deliver lasers up to 200mw...highly dangerous and illegal.
I order my LED cycling headlamps here...awesome units for only 80US or so.
I bought 80 francs worth of stuff from them a while ago..but still got hit with tax and about 50 francs worth of flat rate penalties, because they failed to invoice the package properly. So I think it is better to order more, and reduce the impact of the penalties.
I bought my camera from dealextreme.com for ~190 chf and had to pay about 50 chf taxes/post collections. The problem with the parcel was that dealextreme declared the value of the package of 86 USD and at the same time they put invoice inside the package indicating full price of camera. Swiss customs opened the package took out the invoice and charged tax for a full price also charging additional money for "services". Probably that what you call "penalty".
I would recommend buying from ebay. There are many sellers for HK, China selling the same products as dealextreme. You can always request them to declare package as a 'gift' and in this case you will not pay any taxes or other collections.