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.