The best conference room webcams are the perfect video conferencing solution for meeting rooms and groups.
The best conference room webcams are different to the usual best webcams for home working. Rather than being used for a single person, these handy devices enable an entire room to participate. Using wide angle, even 360º, lenses with smart cameras and microphones, the best conference room webcams are able to connect an entire table of people.
There's no denying that the events of saw the rise of video conferencing, from family catch-ups to work meetings. However, as we begin to see a move into a more flexible way of working, there will be a growing need for conference room webcams which can connect an office-based meeting with the remote workers who are still calling in from home.
Best conference room webcams
1. Meeting Owl Pro
Best conference web cam for tracking team-member’s faces for automatic 360˚ meetings. The Meeting Owl was a successful product, picking up several awards for its cute (but not too cute) design, capped with a 360˚ camera and equipped with the software to identify team members who are talking and give them centre stage. Along the top (unless disabled in the options) is a thin strip showing a perspective-corrected strip of the whole-room view; in both cases the images are considerably more flattering than from a shorter camera thanks to the device's 273mm body height (nearly 11 inches), and the sound is capably handled by the 8 mics which also help locate the subject (and boast a good pick-up range of 5.5m / 18ft). The ‘Pro’ is the newer version, with a more powerful processor, better resolution and louder speakers without too significant a price bump.
2. Logitech Rally
A conference camera big enough for a classroom. The Rally camera is a Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) camera which uses Logitech’s RightSense technology to automatically frame every participant. It also boasts good-quality low-light and tone control technology which prioritizes faces, no bad thing when you’re under office lighting. The camera is sold on its own, or as part of the Logitech Rally Plus system, which includes a display hub with a pair of stereo speakers and a smaller table hub to which you can connect microphones. To make setup easy, the cables and devices come stickered (though you can use a much longer Cat6A cable to connect the hubs if you choose). A nice touch is that the mic pods can be daisy chained, making fitting to different sized rooms easy, and while the remote only has two presets it is good to see a little more urgency in camera movement when one is chosen compared to gentle panning from the directional pad.
3. Jabra Panacast
Compact Panoramic WebCam for 180˚ Coverage. This camera is ideal for meeting rooms where the table touches the same wall as a display. It can be positioned beneath the screen and get a full 180˚ screens-eye view of the whole room so no participants are excluded. Connection is via an optional hub or directly to your computer via USB (the later affording decent portability with a laptop). The system seems to do a good job of blending video from each of the lenses, though you can also opt for ‘intelligent’ mode which zooms into areas of video with movement in (sit too still too long in a meeting and you might get cropped!). Although the device states it’s 4K, it’s worth noting that the reality is that each lens has a 13-megapixel sensor but the camera will zoom past pixel parity so you may see resolution softening on close ups. If you’re not sure you want to share your whole room, Jabra have you covered too; you can choose various fields of view down to 90˚ via the Jabra Direct software. Visit shomdom.com