we’re all making more zoom and skype calls at the moment there’s just one issue most laptops have got terrible webcams the macbook pro 16-inch which i reviewed recently is a perfect example of that you know three and a half thousand pound laptop with a rubbish webcam so what do you do well you could buy a 20 pounds or 30 ish ones view 1080p webcam now i’ve done that and i think i can save you a bit of money let me explain why welcome back to marcos reviews uh just remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode right um i do lots of video calling these days you probably do a fair amount yourself um and the three and a half thousand pound macbook pro that i bought has a terrible webcam which is annoying this video isn’t about that it’s we all know that is the case if you don’t go and buy one and be disappointed now you can get away with modern laptop webcams but they just make you look a bit dreary they don’t cope well with bad light and they’re just grainy and horrible basically um so i thought how much should we gonna spend to get a decent replacement so i found this the ones view 1080p webcam
now this was for in the uk at about about 20 pounds delivered on amazon i think in the us it goes up to about 30 dollars between again 20 or 30 dollars it’s it’s cheap however it’s 20 pounds or 20 30 that you could spend on all sorts of things so should you put that money down on this um well i’ve bought it and uh let me explain so first of all i was gonna do an unboxing video for this that was fairly pointless as it turns out because it just comes in a little brown box and that’s it basically but it’s cheap so you kind of expect that it also comes with a ridiculously long usb cable i don’t know where they’re expecting you to plug this into but that’s not going to be an issue it’s not badly made actually um it’s pretty solid um it uses this kind of clasp thing which you put on top of the top of your monitor or your laptop and yeah it’s it’s all right it’s not bad at all um it’s it feels like you could throw it around it would be right so build quality wise i’m actually quite impressed it’s made out of plastic obviously the hinge i would guess after a while will probably give in but it’s not bad for the money actually so build quality pretty good now attaching it to the laptop i use a laptop i do have an imac but i’m not using at the moment and the macbook is my primary device the problem i found that was
when you attach it to the laptop you do lose sight of top of the screen now i guess most webcams of this kind with this kind of design um this little clamp are gonna have that issue they’re gonna they’re gonna obscure part of the screen it just felt a bit too much really i couldn’t see the top bar of the menu it also didn’t feel particularly secure on the on the laptop again i didn’t test it with a monitor um it will probably fail a little bit better on a monitor but don’t expect it to be rock-solid particularly if you’re using it on a laptop but obviously you wanna know what the video is like that’s what matters so i did a video and audio test it has a built-in mic as well um so let’s scoot over to that and i thought i’d just compare it against the macbook pro here it is so this is recording directly to the webcam and using the built-in mic as well as i record now i’ve not heard a recording yet could be dreadful who knows and now we’re back to the macbook so this is the built-in macbook pro 16-inch it’s the laptop i spent three and a half thousand pounds on it’s the built-in webcam and it’s the mic as well again as i’m doing this i’ve not heard
the footage back yet i won’t until the edit so be interesting to see how that comes out the macbook does not cope well with light and bad light rather i’m going to be honest i’m really disappointed with this um it is it did only cost 20 pounds but i just expected a little bit more i mean on amazon it’s got really good reviews actually if you look at the the list of reviews it’s great and it’s very it could be very very tempting to just say get it it’s 20 quid it’s better than your laptop you know it’s a no-brainer unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be better than the macbook and the macbook is i can’t emphasize this enough the macbook is absolutely bottom of the rung in terms of webcam quality it’s dreadful this is worse i personally think than the macbook you can see in those videos there’s dreadful lens distortion okay it’s the lens is tiny it’s not a dslr camera or anything but um the whole world around you looks like you’re in some sort of fishbowl the thing that surprised me the most and that disappointed me the most actually was that it coped dreadfully with light and you can probably see when i turned with my back to face the
window i was suddenly cast in darkness and actually that didn’t happen with the macbook you’re always going to have some form of natural light coming in and the problem with that is that it can occasionally shroud you in darkness i think we’ve all been on these zoom meetings and team meetings where there’s been at least one participant who you just can’t see their face they’re just a silhouette the great scheme of things that doesn’t matter a huge amount but it it does it does impact the experience of having a remote meeting and it might make people feel uncomfortable who knows um this dealt very badly with that so um that’s quite a big thing for me the other thing to mention is the mic now i did just get this out of the box plug it in didn’t do any configuration really apart from turn on high quality on the video there weren’t any settings i could find for the audio um and i yeah the audio volume in zoom and in quicktime which i used to record those those little bits of footage and was all set at a decent level so why it was peaking so much and distorting i have absolutely no idea but that again illustrates that this isn’t a great webcam because you should be able to plug it in and the audio should just be fine you should hear yourself and not have all that horrible distortion and again the macbook one isn’t fantastic um despite being
studio quality um but it you know it does the job a lot better so yeah that wasn’t very very good at all now while i was putting this video outlined together um part of the thing i was going to talk about was whether or not you could use this for podcasting and for recording yourself a bit like this really i mean i’m using a proper camera here but um if you were just wanting to get into youtube and and use something better than your onboard laptop webcam could you use the ones view 1080 as a camera for vlogging and that kind of stuff and no you can’t it’s absolutely dreadful it’s not a camera for podcasting or vlogging please don’t buy it for that reason there are other options out there and my advice would be to spend a bit more now i don’t have it with me but i have used in the past the logitech c920 hd pro isn’t cheap um you know you’re talking about 80 uk pounds but you’re getting a very good webcam for that and it does very very good high quality 1080p video that will get you what
you want in terms of video quality and i i would say personally you could probably use it for live streaming and um a little bit of vlogging and that kind of thing this isn’t a replacement for that and i appreciate it’s a lot less costly um i don’t think that’s the point i think um there’s a point with tech where things are just too cheap for me this falls into that bracket and it’s a surprise it’s a genuine surprise because it’s a top-rated amazon product all the reviews on there are pretty pretty good i know you have to be careful with reviews but on the whole they look like they’re genuine i just don’t think it’s very good at all so basically save yourself some money you can still get by with your laptop webcam while you save up for a better webcam please do i would recommend instead opting for something like the logitech which i’ll put a link to in the description if you fancy that so that’s it just don’t bother with the ones view it’s it’s terrible i’ve talked quite a bit in this video about the 16-inch macbook pro which is now my main device carry on watching for a link to a long-term review of that laptop where i reveal some very interesting findings for getting the webcam i think you’ll find that interesting but until next time take care and thank you very much for
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