The camera was fine – has a wide angle that will capture an entire room – a big room!
The microphone picks up very well, but the noise cancellation on it needs some tweaking (and you do have options for tweaking, but it still needs some improvement or else you get the “tin foil factory” kind of noise).
Naturally, if you’re doing a single person shot, it’s going to flatten you out a bit. The camera really shines if you’re doing the whole room.
Says it’s “Zoom Room Certified” and since Zoom can’t seem to cancel noise effectively either, maybe they can work on this together to get a better result.
Granted, most of this can be fixed in post, but people on a live feed would probably prefer a better sound. It’s the incidental sounds that end up making the worst noise, they do manage to get the voices clearly through the noise cancellation, but the roar of noise cancellation sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
Has good AI tracking – the camera will follow you or whomever is speaking.
Overall, there’s a lot of capacity here for good results.
Generally, any microphone anchored to a camera that’s going to be a distance from your speakers will have to work extra hard to produce good sound. This does produce clear voices, so it’s doing a good job with the limitations it has in build to get the message through.
I have a separate review for an add-on mic from RayBit that can improve your sound experience (which is probably how I’d set it up even if I didn’t have the compatible RayBit mic – getting your mic close to your speakers solves a lot of problems).
I think this quality of equipment will be something you can continue to upgrade with firmware, which makes it less of a “one and done” and more of an ongoing investment where the quality can continue to improve.
That’s a lot better investment than dropping $50 on a webcam every year that doesn’t have half the capacity of this one.
The fact you can control a lot of these factors gives it a lot more possibility for improvement over the out of the box performance. We do that with our TVs, computers, phones, so it’s not unreasonable to expect to do the same with a high-end web conferencing camera.
NOTE: SINCE THE ADD-ON MICROPHONE IS NOT ALLOWING ME TO POST A SEPARATE REVIEW, I WILL ADD THAT THE ADD-ON MIC IS A FIVE-STAR MIC. SO BETWEEN THE FOUR-STAR CAMERA AND FIVE-STAR MIC, YOU’RE GETTING A 4.5 STAR PRODUCT THAT’S WORTH THE INVESTMENT.
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