The best conference room webcams can make a huge difference to everyone's enjoyment of virtual meetings. With the rise of hybrid working, the need for a quality conference room camera is more important than ever – bad sound and crappy video can be a horrible, frustrating experience.
Thankfully, the quality and flow of virtual meetings can be improved enormously with the best conference room webcams. On this page we've picked the best conference room webcams for different uses based on our assessment of their specs, features, use cases and customer reviews. We've assessed video quality, audio quality and the inclusion of special features like connectivity, face detection or AI enhancements. Some conference room cameras have pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) capability, automatically tracking the speaker, while others have handy connectivity features that allow them to be controlled via a smartphone app.
If you need more guidance on what to look for, scroll to the bottom of this page for some tips to get you started. If you're looking for a simple webcam for one-to-one calls rather than conferences, see our list of the best webcams. We also have a guide to the best Macbook webcams if you're an Apple user, and a guide to the best monitor with webcam.
The best conference room webcams
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In our assessment, the Meeting Owl Pro is the best and smartest conference room camera you can buy at the moment. In many ways is streets ahead of its competition. This camera sports a single lens and yet provides an effective 360° view of a room, ensuring that everyone is in the shot. It's also got eight omnidirectional microphones, rated to cover an area with a radius of 18 feet (about 5.5m) and Smart Zooming technology to pick up speakers sitting further away from the camera.
The camera also sports a host of smart connected features. Hook it up to the internet via the Wi-Fi connection, and you can take advantage of the Owl Labs' Smart Meeting Room ecosystem, which makes it easy to connect up multiple cameras in different places, and is fantastic if you're co-ordinating large-scale meetings with teams in multiple locations. You can also control the camera via your smartphone when it's connected, and the Meeting Owl Pro is broadly compatible with all major conferencing apps as well as third-party accessories like microphones.
This is certainly not a cheap conferencing camera. It's the premium option for teams and businesses who want their conferences to run as smoothly as in-person meetings – and we found that it passes that test with flying colours.
For a smaller, cheaper conferencing camera option than the Meeting Owl Pro, we'd recommend looking at the Logitech C930e. Its short-range mic is rated to just 1m, which limits it to smaller conference rooms, but for small teams or solo meeting participants, this should work just fine. Plus, the camera earns points for its video quality, as its Full HD 1080p resolution is higher than average for a conference camera, especially one at this price.
The lens has a 90° field of view, which is easily enough to get multiple participants into the same shot. Additionally, the generous resolution allows for a 4x digital zoom, which is hugely handy for zooming in on whiteboards or flip-charts should the need arise. The C930e is also surprisingly adept at handling challenging lighting situations, such as backlighting or low-light, which is extra handy for those times you need to dial in from a less-than-ideal location.
Delivering top-quality video in a camera that's small enough to carry around with you, this is the ideal conferencing camera for the mobile professional.
The Kandao Meeting Pro is a conferencing camera ideally suited for those who know a little more than average about video. It can bypass a computer entirely, and connect direction to a screen, monitor or mixer via its HDMI connection, and it can capture Full HD video encoded in H.264 and MJPEG formats. There's also an SD card slot, which gives you an offline means of recording your meetings, should you need one.
Like the Meeting Owl Pro, it offers 360° coverage, so you can cover the entire meeting room. It has an eight-microphone, omnidirectional audio system so that all speakers in the meeting can be heard, and it has its own built-in Android system, which makes it easy to install firmware updates.
The Kandao Meeting Pro can be controlled via its Bluetooth remote, or using a connected smartphone. Plus, thanks to its built-in hi-fi speaker, you'll be able to hear the other end of the meeting as clearly as they'll be able to hear you.
There’s some slightly tricksy copywriting in the Microsoft Lifecam Studio – it’s billed as a 1080p camera, and this is technically true, but you need to use some third-party webcam software to get its sensor to record at this resolution – otherwise it’ll top out at 720p.
Cyberlink YouCam is a good choice, especially if you’re using it for business conferencing, where a little more fidelity is expected. Still, the CMOS sensor on the camera does do an impressive job, producing a vivid and pleasing image with good colour accuracy across the board. As a webcam with microphone it does the job pretty well, though without the fancy noise-cancelling features of more expensive cameras.
It's far more sophisticated than most people will need (and at $3,900 / £3,000 far too expensive for most people to pay), but if you're the CEO of the next potential unicorn, and you have large boardroom meetings that need the perfect sound, the Logitech Rally Bar is our pick as the best conference room webcam when money's not an issue.
It has six microphones to pick out speech in larger rooms, and if you have a really large room and find that their seven-metre (23ft) range isn't enough, you can add up to four Logitech Mic Pods, which you can dot around the room. It treats audio to some sophisticated AI wizardry that auto-levels loud and soft voices and cancels out unwanted noise – a system that learns as it goes, thus getting better over time.
The lens features a 15x zoom that allows you to zoom in on one person on a call from a distance. The device also supports two external displays – one to show the view from the camera. The Logitech Rally looks the part for a professional board room and it can be used both as a USB device or as a standalone system by adding an optional Tap device.
Though it may look like a box camera from a hundred years ago, the Huddly IQ is an advanced conference room webcam that uses AI-powered tech to frame up subjects for a smoother viewing experience. It can even provide meeting-room analytics.
This means the camera can relay how many people are in a room, how frequently a room is used and when a room is or isn’t occupied – useful if you’re on the other end and need a quick notification for when a meeting is ready to start. It produces Full HD video with a generous 150° – though make note that you do have to pick up the 5-mic module as well if you want the audio to be recorded.
Though it may look like one of Batman’s stealth jets, the Jabra Panacast is one of the most sophisticated conference webcams on the market. It’s capable of capturing “panoramic” 4K resolution – not true 4K exactly, but still pretty impressive, and more pixels than most other conferencing webcams.
The 180° field of view means you can put it up against the wall and capture a whole room, while the intelligent zoom system means the camera will hone in on points of interest. The 2-mic setup isn’t quite as comprehensive as we’ve seen on other webcams, but otherwise this lightweight webcam is great for the majority of conferences and meetings.
If you’re looking to upgrade a cheap webcam for the best video quality possible for individual presentations to conferences (or in small groups), the Dell Ultrasharp Webcam should be your port of call. The name suggests that it should provide a sharp and highly detailed image, and we weren't disappointed. It's capable of shooting 4K at 30 frames per second or Full HD at a silky-smooth 60 frames per second.
We found that the design and build have a premium feel, and the aluminium frame makes a refreshing change from the plastic of most cheaper webcams. There's no microphone at all, so you’ll need to factor in the cost of one if you want dedicated audio for your conferences. This may seem a surprising omission, but there's also a logic that if you care enough about quality to buy a 4K webcam, you probably want better audio than what can be provided by a built-in mic.
What? Meta makes a conference room webcam? Yes, it does. Facebook's parent company's forays into hardware have come up with some curious devices, and we think this is actually pretty good. It makes sense in a way, since the original Facebook portal was designed precisely for use in video calls on Messenger and Whatsapp, both of which Meta owns. It seems to have realised that this was too restrictive to be of much use, though, and the 2021 Metal Portal Plus also comes with Zoom and Microsoft Teams preloaded, and you can also access other web-based apps such as Skype.
It's surprisingly capable as a conference room webcam as long as those attending aren't too big a group and can sit close together. It can also be useful for other individual situations where you might prefer a webcam and screen without a keyboard in the way, such as presentations and demonstrations.
You get Full HD video and a 14-inch HD screen in one package, with no need for a laptop or PC to make it work, and no need for a stand like you would need with a tablet. The camera automatically pans and tilts to follow the speaker by using facial recognition. At around $349 / £349 before you factor in discounts, it's a nifty device so long as you don't need the flexibility to use any platform you choose.
Though it’s a few years old now, the Logitech ConferenceCam Connect will still get the job done for the majority of conference-room requirements, delivering good-quality Full HD video and perfectly clear audio. Its tubular shape is a little unusual – it makes it easy to transport, though a little more vulnerable to being knocked over than other webcams with more secure stands.
It’s designed with some sympathy for technophobes, offering impressive plug-and-play ease of use and compatibility with the usual video conferencing apps – Zoom, Skype for Business, etc. It also runs on an internal battery that can last for a 3-hour video call, giving you even more setup flexibility.
How should I choose the best conference room webcam?
One of the main deciding factors is likely to be your budget. Specialist conference webcams with features like facial recognition and more powerful microphones cost more than some smaller businesses will want to shell
out, so in our guide to the best conference webcams above, we've included some standard webcams as well.
There are a number of factors worth thinking about when selecting the best conference room webcam. The resolution of the camera is quite important. Although you probably don’t need stunning 8K resolution for your conferences, if you can get at least Full HD it will make the video experience much more pleasant for those attending and ensure that everyone can see what they need to if there’s a presentation taking place.
A good conference room webcam should also have a microphone, or at least the capacity to attach one, and you may want to think about how well the webcam integrates with your software or OS of choice. Some conference room webcams come with useful integrations for systems like Android, enabling control via your phone or tablet.
How much should the best conference room webcam cost?
The price of a webcam for video conferencing can vary enormously. Video conferences can involve different numbers of people, and businesses have different budgets, so in our list above we've sought to provide options at different price points, from around $50 / £40 right up to around $3,900 / £3,000.
The best video conferencing webcam overall, at least in terms of technological sophistication and audio quality is the Logitech Rally, but that misses out on the top spot on our list because it's way more sophisticated than most people need and almost prohibitively expensive for individuals or small businesses.
We've included a couple of budget conferencing webcams such as the Logitech C930e, which starting at around $80 / £90 will do well for many small conferences. However, for the best balance of excellent quality and flexibility with a price that's not too astronomical, we rate the Owl Labs' Meeting Owl Pro. It's pricey at around $1,200 / £1,000 full price, but it offers superb 360-degree audio and video capture.
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