Logitech has rolled out a new webcam for the business market. The Logitech C930e is a camera that has hardware H.264S encoding, a Carl Zeiss-certified lens and an aim for business applications. So, what makes it better for “business” than other Logitech webcams such as the Logitech C920?
For one, it has a 90-degree ultra-wide angle (vs. 60 degrees for most webcams), but Logitech says that it made sure that its lens won’t induce image deformations often associated with such lenses (we’ll have to test that for ourselves). Secondly, Logitech has optimized the C930e for Microsoft Lync, a popular enterprise video communication software. That said, it’s not clear if the optimizations are functional (make things easier) or performance related.One thing that business people like to do is to video chat as a group, which means that the wide angle allows the call recipient to see everyone, and if there is a need to draw on a board, or focus on a specific person, the Logitech C930e can do this with its electronic pan and zoom function. The idea is that the webcam most likely has a 3 to 5 megapixel resolution (or more? we need detailed specs, Logitech…), which is many times higher than what Skype can stream. So it is possible to zoom into a specific area without inducing blurriness.
The Logitech C930e is said to be able to stream at 1080p resolution if network conditions allow. If it is anything like the previous C920, results should look very nice if your network is fast enough. When I reviewed the C920, many people were very impressed by the video quality, and I expect nothing less from the C930e and would be disappointed if that was not the case.
At this point Logitech is quite a juggernaut when it comes to webcams, and as time goes by, we have not seen a whole lot of competition. Microsoft used to be a good contender, but nothing really came out from Redmond as of late in terms of high-end camera. Apple used to be really good with its iSight, but they too scaled that down. Which webcam do you have and do you think that this is still a technology worth investing in?