Do you need a great HD webcam? This might be the product for you. See the specs in this Logitech c920 webcam review.
The Logitech HD Pro Webcam c920 has many positives and negatives. In short, the picture and video quality are mostly positives, and the reliability is a negative. Let’s go much more in depth with this product.
The design of this Logitech webcam is simple. The camera itself is only 1 inch tall by 3 inches wide by 1 inch deep. It’s attached to a foldable base with a rubber coating on select parts. This allows it to clamp onto smooth surfaces without slipping. The camera cannot be removed from the base, but the base can be screwed onto other items.
Connect the camera to a USB 2.0 port using the attached USB cord, which cannot be removed. It’s USB 2.0 certified and USB 3.0 ready. I highly recommend using a USB 3.0 port that’s connected directly to the motherboard of your computer. When I connected this camera to a USB port at the front of my computer, it would freeze while recording every few minutes. It even did it in the video review attached to this post.
This camera comes with Carl Zeiss optics for great photo quality, according to the manufacturer. It takes beautiful photos and videos if you’re close enough to the camera and have decent lighting in the room. The camera can focus (auto or manually) 10cm from the lens up to about half a meter (around 2 feet). Any further than that and the quality of the photos and videos starts dropping.
The photo quality can be set to 2 MP, 3 MP, 6 MP, or 15 MP, and is saved in the mjpeg format. The video resolution when recording can be set to 360p, 480p, 720p, or 1080p, and is saved in the .mp4 format using H.264 encoding. However, the max video resolution when using video calls is only 720p. The frame rate is supposed to be 30 frames per second, but I almost never get that when recording. My videos vary between 14 and 28 FPS for some odd reason.
The audio quality isn’t anything special. If you’re close enough to the built-in microphone, it should be able to pick up your voice. I don’t recommend using the webcam’s microphone if making videos on YouTube or if you’re using the camera to make a professional video call, unless you are a very loud speaker.
To use this camera, you must download the Logitech Webcam Software from the official website. The software comes with a number of settings that improve lighting, sets focus to auto or manual, sets the video and photo resolution, and an audio feature (Called RightSound) that seems to make the audio worse for some reason. This program is usually pretty good, but I do experience issues from time to time when using a separate microphone. You can select a different microphone when recording instead of using the built-in microphone, but it doesn’t always work. Using the automatic light settings (called RightLight) is usually a bad idea, as well. You can click the RightLight option once to automatically set the lighting options, but it’s best to uncheck the box after that before recording. Same goes for the auto focus settings. If you keep these boxes checked, the lighting and focusing will continue to change as you’re recording, and it can give you some annoying results.
Basically, this webcam is great if you take the time to learn all the settings and make sure you’re doing the right thing. You may still run into a few troubles with the microphone settings, however.