Our evil robot overlords have dispatched their minion to watch our every move
I’ve reviewed some weird looking stuff in these hallowed pages, but Logitech’s BCC950 Conference Cam deserves an award for being one of the wackiest ever. It’s how I would imagine the pet that a Dalek comes home to each night would look – and you can make it even odder if you put the spherical camera on the vertical pole that’s included in the box. In case you were wondering, it’s not telescopic... That would be just too much craziness for this reviewer to handle.
Look past the styling, however, and you'll discover that Logitech has built a very high quality video conferencing module that incorporates at tilt/swivel/zoom camera with a full 1080p sensor. It also features a Carl Zeiss lens with nine-point auto focus, so you should easily be able to see the beads of sweat on that person in your business conference who gets called out for not completing the tasks they were given.
The direction the camera looks can be adjusted from the base, using a small remote, or even using software. Logitech don’t provide any apps, or even drivers, but when attached by USB to a Windows 7 PC these were installed automatically. It works alongside Skype without any real effort, should you have that installed. I didn’t test it with all of them, but I’m reliably informed that it also works with Adobe Connect, Avaya, Cisco WebEx and other Cisco Video Conferencing applications, Citrix Go to Meeting, LifeSize Connections, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Video Chat, Microsoft’s Lync and Office365, and Vidyo.
What’s well thought out about the BCC950 is that, other than requiring a host PC, it’s entirely self-contained. The base has a speaker and microphone, so in theory you don’t require extra accessories to organise a business call with video and sound.
The field of view is 78°, and the Sphere can be rotated through 180° horizontally and 55° vertically, so hopefully nobody needs to be speaking from out of shot.
The only problem I noticed in respect of the coverage is that the microphone doesn’t have the level of coverage that the video gets, and in that respect an external microphone jack might have been a good option for who might be sat well back from the base. The sound is also only mono, so if you don’t see the person speaking then you’ve no idea where to point the camera. I’ve no complaints about is the image quality, though, which is generally excellent even when the lighting situation isn’t perfect.
For home users this device is probably overkill, unless you’ve close relatives that have moved to some distant part of the globe. However, for a business that wants to reduce the cost of travelling, and have a simple-to-organise facility for conferencing, it’s a solid choice. Mark Pickavance
A strange looking but effective conferencing tool.