Mi Webcam Review [INDIA]

 With all the things happening in 2020, one thing which has flown off the shelves are webcams. 

Introduction :

The only available options are some unknown and less trustworthy brands with not so great reviews. This is the same situation be it Amazon or Flipkart or even the popular websites which sells computer hardware like PrimeABGB, Vedant and pcstudio.in.

However a Google search reveals that Amazon is selling a webcam made by Xiaomi at a very attractive price and it has got pretty decent reviews as well. This is the same webcam which Xiaomi is bundling with their Horizon laptops in India.  We are going to review this webcam today but first let us do a quick unboxing.  

Unboxing :

The box is pretty small, like a pack of cards. In the front,  they have mentioned details like a 720p high resolution USB Plug and Play, which is very good and that it is lightweight.  In the back there is not much written except that the MRP is 1499 and they have mentioned some manufacturing and import details. However, I have bought it for 1100 rupees from Amazon.  Now let's open the box.  Okay so this is the main camera, let's keep it aside for the moment.  There's a tiny user manual, just two pages.  

You can read the details here by pausing the video if you want.  Let's keep this aside for the moment and open the main package which is the webcam itself.  This is very light as mentioned in the box. I think it is made of plastic let's see.  Yes it is plastic but it looks really good and slick unlike other entry-level webcams in the market.  

Let's see what is there in the back.  There is nothing there There is a rubber strip here which is intended to keep the webcam to not slip off from the top of the monitor and a USB cable of matching color.  When you connect the camera for the first time you hear this sound and that's it. 

Installation :

Super fast installation, there are no other installation prompts or anything and when you go to the Device Manager you will see that the camera is already shown as installed and all the drivers are already installed and it's working properly.  So the claim in the box that it is  USB plug-and-play truly checks out,  it has a very streamlined installation in Windows 10. 

Few Drawbacks :

There are a few drawbacks of the Mi webcam. Number one, the slot here is actually pretty narrow Number two,  this is a non-adjusting head there is no way you can adjust the angle of the camera.  Number three, the USB cable is pretty short and it is around two feet in length only.  Case in point the width of my monitor is actually pretty slim only around 15 millimeters however if you look at the camera you will see it is barely just sticking around because of the rubber feet. 

If it was not there, it would have fallen off long back.  This makes you believe that the camera is actually meant for a laptop.  If you see from the back because of the non-adjusting head you cannot do anything about the fit of the camera it will just barely hang in there if you use a desktop. However, that said, I have been using this camera for almost past two weeks now and it has not fallen off, it is sticking around in this position. 

A small bump might throw it off but that has not happened yet.  Now let's look into some footage from the camera. Currently the camera is fixed on top of my monitor.  As you can see the field of view of the camera seems quite wide and you can see a lot of portion of the room around me. However I really wanted myself to be a bit more zoomed in into the frame but there is no way to obviously adjust the field of view and also the head cannot be moved of the webcam, so no further adjustments are possible unless you change the location of where you are fixing the webcam.  

Here one thing to note is my monitor is raised at around six inches from the table, so you can expect the actual footage to be a bit lower in your case and it will probably look a bit more appropriate.  So this is a better angle where i have actually attached it on top of my laptop screen and hence I am filling most of the frame as expected.  Let's look into how the quality of the camera is.  

Image Quality :

So as you expect from a 720p webcam the quality is nothing to write home about however during video conferencing people will not be seeing the full footage in the entire screen like this, but rather they will be looking at like something like this, and as you can see the resolution doesn't matter that much anymore, you are not able to see the pixelation as much as when the footage was showing full screen.  

The left side footage here is actually from the laptop's inbuilt webcam and the right side footage is actually from the mi webcam hd let's compare the two footages i've intentionally kept the backlight on to see how well the camera handles uh presence of strong backlight which is very common in our our households right so as you can see even with a strong backlight it is not making my face dark and the dynamic range is popping up quite well with with no impact on colors whatsoever coming to the footages i would say the dale camera is giving me a slightly greenish tint while the mi camera is giving a slightly red tint in the dale camera .

The background is very slightly blurred and i am slightly sharper however in mi camera both the foreground and the background is equally sharp shadow handling in both the cameras are good so i would say it's it's pretty decent for conferencing purposes so who is this webcam for the short cable length the non-tilting head and the narrow placement slot dictates that this webcam is primarily meant for laptops however every single laptop in the market except the xiaomi horizon laptops come with webcams inbuilt and the video quality in those webcams are pretty much same as this standalone xiaomi webcam this leaves .

The desktop users at such an attractive price probably being the cheapest in the market and clean good looks this definitely makes a compelling proposition for people who can live with the compromises i spoke about this is pretty much the only reliable webcam available in the market right now .