Logitech MX Brio 705 – where Ultra HD meets Ultra AI Logitech has marched back into the webcam world with the MX Brio, an Ultra HD device sprinkled with copious AI. But is it worth $199.99? The PC peripherals maker sent an MX Brio 705 for Business to Vulture Central, and first impressions are good. It is a sturdily built device that clips on top of a monitor. It'll run at 4K …
What is the point of a 4K business-focused webcam? If you are talking to a network-distant person whatever conference software you are using will reduce you to a low resolution blob, and if they are within a high-bandwidth low-latency connection distance, then you might as well walk across the office and visit them. I'll stick with one costing no more than a quarter of what this one does.
That's a very good question. My consumer-grade Panasonic G90 camera generates 100Mbit/sec at 4K and pro-models can easily produce double that.
On the other hand a lot of action cameras and photographic cameras can now be used as webcams (usually at 1080p, which I'd have said was a practical limit for videoconferencing on general purpose networks) out of the box, are not that dissimilar in price, and have additional uses.
Difficult to see there's more than a niche market.
Like you, I don't think there's much need for a 4K webcam for the "20 people in a virtual meeting room going over a Powerpoint of the Q2 results" type of business. My guess is that it's more aimed at the "one person in a room streaming on a specialist site for the entertainment of others" type of business. I've heard that sort of thing is quite popular. Twitch, for example. You can probably think of others.
One good use of a higher res camera, especially attached to a (relatively) fixed location: you can clip to a small region of interest and still get a reasonable result for your viewers. You may need to run some extra software (e.g. OBS) if the Logitech stuff isn't up to the job.
Using an ROI is good for cutting out the wide angle shot that includes the window, the annoying coworker, the stoopid "motivational" poster. Or, when using it for "old fashioned"[1] sharing of sketches, just that bit of your desk.
And, if even the ROI is a bit large, it can always be shrunk down before going on the wire.
[1] no idea why sharing an image of a sketch is so derided - no matter how much colab software you are running, doodling on paper is still going to be a lot faster, easier and with generally better results for the majority of people than trying to whip up something in Inkscape or the equivalent.
Hmmm ... you may be underthinking this...
Higher quality cameras will result in better images even when downrezzed, all else being equal
Conferencing video codecs are pretty clever these days
There are a lot of different working environments - I can still save anything up to an hour over a "walk across the office" by delegating that to our high-speed, low latency campus network.
Even at the home office, (4g wireless broadband 70/25 Mbps), the video and audio quality is still noticeably differentiated
Also at home, we have no aerial, no landline and no trouble streaming 4K in a semi-rural environment
Back in the days when we were all on-campus, team meetings could easily generate 20-30 mins of faff/overhead even with a meeting room on the same corridor as all our offices
Guest speakers are a breeze
Online support is a breeze
I have an HD webcam on top of my desktop monitor and a 4K cam on my laptop. The built in cam on the laptop is a POS and my regular meetees can tell the difference between all these setups both in audio and video quality.
You don't need a whole other setup to make high quality video lectures/presentations (you can switch the lights on and select the pro-grade mic for a little extra when needed). These can be uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or our in-house video portal according to purpose.
The world is your oyster...
In non-work contexts, people are really quite up to speed with Teams and Zoom
Network reliability is somewhat better than transport reliability and miles cheaper (a month's connectivity is approximately 2 days on site)
YMMV but there are lots of wins to be had :-)
At my last place we made video conferencing systems and although we experimented with 4K, its still some time away, not everyone is using Full HD yet.
We did by a 4K Brio, and pointed it at our 5x5 screen video wall to capture output of tests, and it worked great for that. It was attached to a Raspberry Pi 4B, and a small Python program gave the correct runes to ffmpeg to capture single frames or videos, do keystone correction (as the camera was in the ceiling looking down), crop out the screen(s) of interest and caption with a timestamp.
I bought a camera from Logitech eons ago, unrelated to this model. (quickcam pro 9000)
The driver installation was abysmal, the sofware side of the thing crashed often and hard. It also had the auto-framing and face-tracking, placing a velociraptor over your face like a vtuber thing.
The icing on the cake happened when I just plugged it on a playstation 3, of all things, and the console just played it like it was native. I think it was developed for Unix or Linux, not Windows.
So, logitech cameras left me with a sore eye...
... meh ...
been there, seen that
We have a largish meeting room in the other continent that has a camera with smart zoom ... now whenever someone coughs or moves their chair or .. the camera will pan & zoom on whoever made the noise ... which usually isnt the person speaking
Even more annoying is it when the room is not even speaking, and the camera starts to randomly pan & zoom to faces in the room, which can be hugely distracting (though sometimes quite entertaining if people realise they were full on zoomed in while picking their nose
Honestly, unless Ai is really, really smart, it can be really, really dumb .. i'd rather stcik to a fixed, wide angle camera thankyouverymuch ....
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