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In our office, we have weekly team meetings via Google Meet. This has worked well through the pandemic as everybody has been working from home simultaneously.
Things have recently changed, and most of the team are now heading into the office. So now we have the struggle to run this weekly team meeting while continuing to engage our remote team members.
When many people are in a room having a face to face meeting, it's tough for the remote participants to keep up and feel part of the discussion.
The answer up until now has been incredibly expensive enterprise video conferencing solutions.
The OBSBOT Tiny 4K webcam changes that at an unbeatable price point.
It is a powerful webcam that uses artificial intelligence to follow the action around the room.
It can move both vertically and horizontally as well as zoom to follow the presenter. This is known as a PTZ, which is short for pan, tilt and zoom.
Not only can it pan, tilt and zoom, but it can do this automatically. This stems from the built-in face focus, object focus and auto framing technologies. It's so good; it feels like a professional videographer is somehow hidden inside.
It can sit on a table, attach to the top of your laptop or screen or be mounted on a tripod (not included).
It's best connected with USB-C, which means no extra power cable is required.
The device comes with a software tool for both Windows and Mac OS. It's easy to use software that has a bunch of handy features, including:
- Manually pan, tilt and zoom (like a CCTV camera)
- Preset positions that the camera goes to
- Fine-tuning of the auto-lock and tracking features
- Anti-flicker settings so you can present in front of TVs or under fluorescent lights.
- And so many more features.
Also built into the device is gesture recognition. This means that you can gesture for it to zoom in on something while you are presenting.
Like most webcams, a microphone isn't included, so you will need to determine if your built-in laptop microphone would suffice or whether you need to buy an additional microphone.
A bunch of accessories are available from OBSBOT, including a microphone, tripod and remote control. We didn't need them.
We found that the device worked with any video or streaming software we tried including Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and YouTube.
While our scenario is a meeting, I could see it working for a lecturer, a salesperson presenting, a live auction, a yoga teacher or even a live theatre performance. This is a fantastic webcam with really advanced features for an amazing price.
