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Perhaps more useful is the face tracking technology. This works pretty well and I think benefits from the fact that the camera doesn’t physically move to follow you. It simply zooms and shifts the picture as you moves. There’s a small delay as it tracks you but as long as you don’t start dancing, it does a good job on following your head and can even try and keep two people in shot at once. Oddly, when testing this particular feature, it seemed to have a far greater preference for Andy than for myself, even though we were sitting next to each other. I tried not to take it personally.

One bug I found was that though the flicker free setting defaulted to 50Hz for the UK, the image still flickered. I discovered that you needed to turn it off and on again for it to actually work.

Among the feature list is what Logitech dubs RightLight 2. This means that the camera compensates for poorer lighting conditions, partly by the camera being equipped with a larger, more sensitive sensor, a better than average lens array and party through software to balance colours our skin tones. The effect is subtle and even when we turned all the office lights off it didn’t make a huge difference with it enabled but it did make for a slightly more natural picture, so I was happy to leave it on.

In fact image quality was the real star of this webcam, with it generating the most natural looking image with the truest colours that I’ve yet seen from a webcam. Even at 15fps the video was very good quality. This is down to the large lens containing five precision-engineered lens elements, and it does seem to make a difference. Combined with its ease of use and good looks I’d say that if you have need for one regularly, spending this much on a webcam is just about justified.

Verdict

The QuickCam Ultra Vision is the best quality webcam I’ve yet tested, producing high quality images with an effective integrated microphone. The software is simple and effective and the video effects are fun. It’s too bulky for use on the move however, and is on the pricey side but the extra quality is worth paying for.

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