If you’re streaming or making YouTube videos, or if you’re videoconferencing with your business partners, you should want the absolute best. Logitech says its newest Brio webcam is also the highest quality webcam you can buy — and it has the specs on paper to make us believe that.
“Our internal motto was to make the ‘Tesla of webcams’”. Those are, admittedly, some pretty lofty aspirations. But that’s what Logitech is saying in its announcement of the $379.95 Brio. We’ll have to try one ourselves to determine whether that’s actually true, but at least in theory the Brio sounds very impressive.
The Logitech Brio runs at a 4K native resolution, and users can select 90o, 78o or 65o fields of view. If you’re happy with 1080p resolution, you can also digitally crop the field of view of the Brio down to 5x. Faster frame rates are also available — 4K at 30, 1080p at 60 or 720p at 90fps are all possible.
It also supports HDR video for a wider dynamic range, automatically balancing highlights and shadows in your streaming video to make sure there are no excessively dark or blown-out areas of the frame. This is just as important as 4K is for overall detail — you can have all the resolution in the world, but you need to be able to resolve those pixels properly too.
The Brio is also one of only a few external webcams that supports Windows Hello, the facial recognition unlocking biometrics built into Windows 10. Hello is one of the best features of Microsoft’s latest operating system — we love it on the Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4 — so to see it come to a desktop machine.
The Logitech Brio will set you back $379.95 when it launches in Australia in late March. It’s looking like it’ll mostly be targeted towards business customers, but you’ll also be able to pick one up for your Twitch streaming or YouTube vlogging needs. [Logitech]