When I needed to use a webcam I usually just pulled out my laptop and do whatever I needed to do on that and transfer to my desktop machine if needed. However as time has gone on I have found it a pain in the ass to pull out the laptop if I wanted to do anything video related so I finally broke down and spent $80 (actually cost me $20 with a $60 credit I had on amazon) and purchased the Logitech C920e Webcam.
One of the first things I noticed is the heft of the camera. Generally webcams tend to be agglomerations (WOW spelled right on first try)* of various plastics and lenses and tend to be light; mostly cause they are small. But when you pull out the Logitech C920e WebCam you will immediately notice the weight. It’s almost unnaturally heavy but this is a feature you want in a good webcam. Additionally there are rubberized area’s where the webcam makes physical contact to where you mount it (on your monitor or laptop probably) that creates the friction needed to keep your webcam steady. There’s a standard tripod mounting hole on the bottom, and even includes a little ‘hood’ which snaps onto the camera with a flip up and down piece to cover the camera. Physically it’s a nice piece of equipment and aesthetically it looks good too.
When I initially installed the webcam everything went pretty much automatically as installs go on Windows 10 and I immediately fired up the Windows Camera program and started messing around with the new camera. Snapped off a couple selfies and then recorded some video. However, after viewing the recorded video it did not pick up the sound. I went to check my microphone settings and something didn’t look right and I immediately could not see what was wrong. I dicked around in Device Manager and played around with Windows updates but after about 15 of messing with it and not being able to get the webcam to record sounds I decided it was time to peruse the documentation.
Aha! It does have a microphone. In fact it’s a stereophonic microphone which in theory is suppose to give me higher quality recording and output. I mean I chose this model over the others specifically because of that. After doing a bit of Googling I discovered that my webcam might have a switch on the bottom that enables and disables the microphone. But that only works if you have the C920, not the C920e. To make a ridiculously long story short you need to download the Logi Tune Setup program which is not included in the box to enable the microphone via a software switch. Everything about this product is great but the software enabled microphone switch and needing to download a specific piece of software to get the microphone working was a bit of a kluge, and annoying, but the quality of the product is great and once you go through and properly set up the device everything works beautifully.
The two pieces of software that I needed to download was Logi Tune Setup and Logitech Capture. The first gives you the software switch and updated drivers and that second piece of software just adds a bunch of enhancements to the camera such as filters, transition effects, colored borders etc etc.
All in all a great piece of hardware and sorely needed addition to my desktop computer.
* How often do you use the word ‘agglomeration hunh? 😉
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