REVIEW – Like a lot of people, I started working from home last year in March. What I thought would be just a few weeks has now turned into well over a year. It does not look like I will be heading back to the office anytime soon. I have been using the webcam built into my laptop for my Microsoft Teams meetings at work and Zoom with friends. That has been ok, but I keep my laptop to my left because I have two large 27-inch monitors as my main display. So I had to move the meeting to my small laptop screen if I wanted to face people properly. When the opportunity came up to review the Konftel Cam10 webcam I jumped at it, hoping it would be a better option for me. Let’s see how it worked out.
What is it?
The Konftel Cam10 (to be referred to as Cam10 for the rest of the article) is a 1080p Full HD USB-based web camera. It has dual microphones, 4x digital zoom, and a nice application for your computer to customize what it shows.
What’s in the box?
The Cam10 came in a rather plain cardboard box. Inside, the web camera was well packaged and protected.
The box was really small because it did not contain a lot of items. These are listed below.
- Cam10 camera with USB cord attached
- Safety sheet
- Installation instructions
Hardware specs
- 1080p Full HD
- Dual Microphones
- 4x Digital Zoom
- Built-in privacy shutter
- Accessory application for MAC or PC to control camera display
- digital picture noise suppression
- Audio noise suppression
- USB 2.0
- 90-degree field of view
- Autofocus
- Warranty 2 years
- 118mm x 37.2mm x 30.8mm without bracket
- 1.55 meter fixed USB cable
- Operating systems supported: Windows 7/8/10, Mac OS X, Linux, Android
Design and features
This camera is pretty simple in its design. The picture below shows the front of the camera. There is a protective film over the lens. You can see the two holes for the dual microphones on either side of the lens. The small silver slit to the top right of the lens is an LED light that will turn blue when the camera is on.
This next picture shows the top and the back of the camera. You can see the slider on the top of the camera to open and close the shutter cover. The back has a hard-wired USB cable. The mounting bracket is permanently attached to the base of the camera.
I opened the mounting bracket so you can see how it looks. The camera is upside down in this picture. If you look at the main picture of this review, you can see the camera is resting with the bracket between two monitors.
This is the standard tripod mount at the bottom of the bracket. This I think is a really nice option for a more permanent and stable mounting solution. In my case, suspending the camera on the bracket between two monitors has worked out really well.
I took a close-up shot of what the lens looks like with the shutter closed. That red dot makes it pretty obvious and I did confirm that no light comes in at all with the shutter closed.
Here is the lens with the shutter open.
Setup
Setup for the camera had to be one of the easiest installs I have done in a long time. I had to take a picture of the installation instructions below. They are hilarious. They pretty much say open the privacy shutter, place the camera where you want it, and plug the USB plug into your computer.
After I did all of that massive amount of work I received two notifications on my Windows PC. The first was that the device was getting set up, and the second was that it was ready to go. It all took less than a minute.
Here is a picture again of how I have the camera mounted. The weight of the back part of the bracket with the tripod mount lets the camera balance nicely and very steadily between the two monitors.
Performance
Well, how did the webcam do? It performed great! I was really happy with the picture and sound quality of the microphones. The picture below is a preview of what was going to display in my Microsoft Teams meeting. Please excuse my office. We are only temporarily renting this space, so I don’t have any kind of decorations up. You can see the nice wide field of view the camera provides. It has great color and clarity in the picture.
I then set up a test meeting with a couple of friends from work. I am happy to report that they both said I came in loud and clear. I sometimes had issues with the microphone on my laptop not picking my voice up very well.
I also got a chance to play around with the Konftel Camera Control application. The application works on both MAC and PC. The picture below is showing the main page of the application with the default display options running. By the way, the glasses I am wearing below are some blue light filtering glasses I will be talking about in a later review. I like that you can flip the camera vertically or horizontally. I have the horizontal flip on so that I have a mirror image going. Once you hit the magnifying glass plus button, you can then use the controls on the left side of the app to shift the camera view around.
The picture below shows me zoomed in and the camera view shifted to put me in the center of the picture.
If you click on the advanced settings on the main screen you get even more options to change. I loved the way the picture looked so I did not mess with it. I think these options would come in handy if you were backlit by a window or had some other weird lighting situations.
The second tab of advanced settings was camera controls. These camera controls of zoom, pan, and tilt do the same thing the buttons on the main screen do. The only thing I could not get to change was the Iris. That slider would never move for me.
What I like
- Great picture and microphone
- Super easy setup
- Nice bracket with tripod mount
- Great application for video manipulation
What needs to be improved
- Nothing else. This camera works great!
Final thoughts
The Cam10 is everything I need in a web camera. It has great picture and microphone quality. You can adjust the video quality in a lot of ways and it does include a nice zoom feature. My only concern is where you would buy this camera because it’s not readily available through retailers like Amazon.
Price: The Konftel Cam10 is sold through U.S. resellers like Call One, Inc. & Hello Direct, Inc.
Source: The sample of this product was provided by Konftel
