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Installation
I proceeded to installing the camera, which nothing short of a hassle to say the least. According to the manual, the back up camera goes mounted on top of the licence plate with the licence plate screws. After affixing the camera to the licence plate, the user must then proceeded to splicing the cable into the reverse light. Though it sounds like a simple task, it took me approximately an hour and a half to complete.
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As I saw it, there were two ways of doing the installation. The first way consisted of installing the back up camera without caring for aesthetics of the vehicle. This would mean that the cable form the camera would wrap around the back bumper and go into the trunk where it would be spliced into the reverse light. The second way, which also the harder of the two, is to consider the aesthetics of the car and route the cables behind the bumper and into the trunk. If you are like me and care about how your car looks, you will most likely choose the latter of the two options.
Thus after ruling the whole 'cables on the bumper' idea, I proceeded to drilling a hole in my bumper. (See picture above)
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Once my new beautiful (and unnecessary) hole in the bumper was completed, I had to slide the cables behind the bumper which proved to be rather difficult task that took the most of the total installation time. After finally getting the cable to the light, I was then struck with yet another problem. The cables that were all bunched together and in order to connect the camera to the light, I first had to cut open the cable enclosure and find which were the correct cables. Following that, I had to cut the wires in half and splice in the camera cables. (See electrical tape in the pictures above)
As I previously said all of this has taken me approximately one hour and a half and I knew what I was doing. To those of you that have never spliced cables together or drilled holes in anything, I highly recommend that you get someone with the knowledge to do it for you because you might end up drilling something that you don't have or ending up with a broken tail light. Luckily the back up camera was wireless so I did not need to wire the camera to the GPS unit which would have been a nightmare in and of itself.
Back Up Camera
Once the installation was completed, I decided to test out the camera. According to the specifications that I took of NEXTAR's web site, the camera was designed to work efficiently up to 7 feet away, so anything more than that and you will not be able to see the object. Also, despite the fact that this is a wide angle lens camera, it still can not look to the sides, so when you are backing out of a parking look you will still have to turn your head to watch for pedestrians and other vehicles. Here are some pictures of how the camera would appear while backing up.
As a side note, the wireless receiver that is attached to the GPS unit works completely independently of any running software. While this is a great feature, there are a couple of drawbacks: First, while backing up over bumpy pavement, the reception is sometimes unstable and shaky thus affecting the picture quality. Second: when you are driving around town with the GPS on and you just happen to come across a signal with more or less a similar frequency, your GPS unit will turn fuzzy and you will no longer be able to see the maps or where you are headed.
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