For years as a tech journalist I joked, “thank goodness video calling didn’t take off” alongside “I have a face for radio”. Then came Covid and the rise of Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Those of us who’d never much used our laptops’ built-in cameras suddenly reached for them… and realised they weren’t very good.
Enter: an array of webcams designed to perch on the top of your screen. They offer better specs than the built-in camera and they connect via plug-and-play USB, so the camera footage simply appears in the same place as your built-in cam. You can even flick between the cameras with ease. The only challenge then is picking which external webcam to buy.
This innovative webcam is a new 4K version of the Obsbot Tiny, a camera built onto a gimbal, complete with gesture control. The two-axis gimbal offers smooth, filmic movement and the camera uses AI to track you as you move. The technical term is a PTZ webcam: it pans, tilts and zooms to follow...