Logitech BCC950 ConferenceCam review

The Logitech BCC950 ConferenceCam is a video-conferencing camera aimed at business users. It takes a lot of its stylistic cues from conference room phones, with a large speaker and microphone grille built into the base. As well as a USB connection to your PC, it requires a mains adaptor, although a provided adaptor allows you to power it via a second USB port instead.

The camera itself is housed in a round ball, and can either sit directly in a round hole in the base or be mounted on a stick to put it close to eye level when on a desk. It’s incredibly neatly designed and wouldn’t look out of place on the conference table of any boardroom.

The camera can tilt up and down through 55 degrees and pan 180 degrees. There’s only an optical rather than digital zoom. The base includes controls for all these features, making it easy to direct the camera so your conference partners can get a good view of whoever and whatever they’re supposed to be looking at. There are also buttons for answering and terminating calls, volume controls and a microphone mute button so you can talk amongst yourselves in privacy. These are all duplicated on the camera’s convenient remote control.

Unfortunately, although it’s definitely a cut above your average webcam, the BCC950’s image quality still isn’t quite as good as we’d hoped it might be. It’s sufficient for video-conferencing, certainly, but the ConferenceCam can struggle with exposure, which is a problem if one of your conference party is sitting anywhere near a window. We also found that we couldn’t get smooth footage at the full 1,920×1,080 – frames were dropped, particularly when we were moving around the room or making other large changes to the scene captured by the camera.

It’s a harsh test but we found the BCC950 struggled with difficult exposure levels

However, if you’re in a consistently-lit environment, overall image quality is good and we prefer a little excessive brightness to a murky image. Colour is consistent and natural, without being too greatly affected by the quality of your ambient lighting. The camera’s autofocus is excellent and although there’s slight graininess and pixilation at the edges of objects moving around close to the camera, it’s still a big improvement on most live video streaming cameras we’ve seen.

We’re really impressed by the clarity of the speaker and microphone, too. When using the webcam in an internet conference call, the people we were speaking to sounded clear and natural, while they reported that our voices were also coming through loud and clear. A 3.5mm stereo port on the base allows you to connect a pair of headphones for more private calls, although it doesn’t support microphone-equipped headsets.

The BCC950 will work with anything from Cisco video conferencing to Microsoft Lync and Avaya’s Asterisk-based VoIP systems. However, it’s Skype that’s usually the VoIP service of choice when it comes to small business video conferencing, thanks to its free basic features and ease of use. Logitech provides a specific Skype plug-in to ensure that the answer and hang-up buttons on the base work properly with your Skype client.

You can answer and hang-up calls using the remote

There are some downsides to video conferencing with Skype that you should bear in mind, though. Skype will by default use all available bandwidth across your internet connection in order to ensure the smoothest possible video quality. This is good news when it comes to the smoothness of your video conference, but can adversely affect anyone who’s trying to work across the same internet connection at the same time. This particularly applies to small businesses sharing a relatively slow cable, VDSL or even ADSL connection among its staff, particularly if other users need to use critical but by default low-priority SSH connections without interruptions.

This is unlikely to be a problem in a business with only a handful of staff, but if it proves to be an issue, your options are to use a router with configurable QoS (Quality of Service) settings which allow you to prioritise certain kinds of network traffic. By default, most QoS prioritises video traffic, which is extremely sensitive to dropped or mis-ordered packets, but a handful of routers provide you with the kind of detailed controls that allow you to limit bandwidth usage by port, IP address or even based on the characteristic usage of specific programs, such as Skype.

While the BCC950 ConferenceCam doesn’t have pixel-perfect picture quality when it comes to capturing fast movement, it’s easy to use, looks good and provides accurate colour and excellent audio quality. If your business uses Skype, Linc or similar services for its communications, then this is an excellent alternative to similarly priced voice-only VoIP conference phones.