The novelty of dash cams has been amplified by YouTubers and others keen to share their motoring exploits on social media. Of course, they also serve an important purpose if you need to keep track of your journeys for business, security or insurance. But whatever your usage, the best dash cams require minimal input from the driver who needs to keep their eyes on the road and not be distracted by operating their personal electronics.

The Garmin Dash Cam Mini is the smallest dash cam that also records in full HD. About the size of a box of matches, it clips easily on to a tiny spindle stuck on the windscreen, and can then be adjusted for optimal framing of the road ahead. If you think audio will enhance the footage, activate the mic using a side-mounted button on the cam.

You rely on the Garmin Drive phone app to see through the camera, and it helps manage all your footage. Operation is delightfully simple. The camera automatically records your journey in temporary one-minute segments, but when an incident occurs (when the camera detects a bump of any kind) your footage is automatically stitched together as a continuous movie and saved on the microSD memory card slotted into the side of the camera. Otherwise, you can press the single button on the back of the camera to immediately save your footage.

Unfortunately, you do depend heavily on the Garmin Drive app, which is slow and buggy. Several features didn’t work for us and moving footage off the Garmin Dash Cam Mini was painfully slow. Thankfully, the resulting 1080p video is surprisingly good, although still not as good as a smartphone, which uses a bigger sensor and a lot more software tricks.

Max video 1 080p @ 30 fps, 140° view, incident-detection sensor, parking mode, R 2 500