Working from home or attending classes online, virtual meeting rooms suddenly have become a really important part of our lives. Agreeably, the webcams built-in to the laptops today still is pretty bad. The quality looks like as if it is from 2000s and just wouldn’t make the cut today. Looking into an investment for acquiring a webcam seems to be a good idea.
What is it?
Mosonth 2K Webcam, as the name suggests is a webcam that you can’t purchase in India. But since we are not bound by geography, I will review it anyway. Let’s get the essentials out of the way first.
Design
I know webcams are not designed to win awards and so the Mosonth 2K QHD Webcam isn’t what one would call a looker. It looks fine with a gloss black faceplate and silver accents to go around it. The camera sensor sits in the middle and the manual focus ring around it is made of the chrome-like element. The sensor is flanked by 2 holes that house the digital microphone, but I bet only one of them is functional while the other rests there for the sake of symmetry. The wire with the USB A on one end exits from the back of the thick casing. By thick I really mean thick. This thing sits rather bulkily on top of a laptop I must add.
Build Quality
The quality of materials used is decent. The plastics don’t flex or creek and looks like it would hold its own with time. The clip/stand setup at the rear has velvet-like padding probably to increase grip in meantime not scratch the surface it’s latched onto.
Camera & Microphone
The camera sensor housed in the middle with a fair amount of protrusion and isn’t that big itself in size. The sensor within is rated at 4MP CMOS according to the manual and has a 67o field of view.
Now, setting aside the specifications, the first observation I recorded was the fact the field of view was pretty narrow even by webcam standards and a consequential problem was that my face looked pretty zoomed in and that wouldn’t fit well with my colleagues. Coming to the picture quality it produced — I doubt it’s 2K. Now I agree that the step up from my HP ProBook’s in-built webcam was a wonderful thing to have, but this can’t be 2K.
The image has a significant drop in noise levels with gains in colours and balanced saturation levels mostly. The images aren’t washed out like webcams usually have produced and I saw some noticeable amount of sharpening going on.
The microphone built into the webcam is bad. I was asked to switch over to the mics on my headphones multiple times. In fact, the microphone performed even worse than the internal microphones on my HP laptop.
Where Do We Stand?
I see a perfect use case for such a product right now than possibly ever before. This would fall into the list of the essentials for one’s ‘work from home’ venture thanks to the global pandemic.
Also Read: iPad Pro is Now a Computer Thanks to the M1 Chip
Even the user manual states its recommended use to be “Online meeting, Online courses and so on” which essentially means this is not the device, a content creator or someone with high-quality video should be looking at. It’s a rather humble upgrade from your laptop’s built-in webcam or an addition to your home PC set up.
The Verdict
I would’ve recommended this to you if it was available in India. There are other options in the Indian market that are not too different from this offering. If you need a webcam then go get one.