Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920, 1080p Widescreen Video Calling and Recording (960-000764) Reviews

1. 39 of 41 people found the following review helpful

   
   This is an awesome Webcam for use with Skype, January 20, 2012

   By 

   J. Hawkes (New York, NY United States) –
   
     

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920, 1080p Widescreen Video Calling and Recording (960-000764) (Personal Computers)

   This is an awesome Webcam for use with Skype(I have not used it with other Video Conference Software).
   The new mount is better than the C910(Not that I had a problem with that one anyway). It now has a tripod mount. I found it works very well on a 25″ LCD Monitor, Laptop and a 42″ rear Projection TV.

   Bandwidth usage Information(tested on Skype 5.8 with an i5-2500K Desktop and Lenovo T410 i5 Vpro laptop with 1Gb/s Lan connectivity)

   1980 by 1080 by 30 FPS peaked out at about 8Mb/s (C920 on Desktop and C920 on laptop)

   1280 by 720 by 30 FPS peaked out at about 3-4Mb/s

   640 by 480 by 30 FPS peaked out at about 1.4Mb/s(I also got this usage when testing a STD laptop camera on a Lenovo T410)

   The C920 does seem to use a lot less CPU than the C910. 640 by 480 on a core 2 Duo HP laptop was up to 80% CPU. With the 920C this dropped to 45% at 1280 by 920 by 30FPS.
   I also found that 640 by 480 utilises VP80(or VP60 in order versions of Skype). It changes to H.264 for 720P and 1080P.

   The C920 hardware H.264 encoding does not seem to be supported on Skype for Linux 2.2.

   Note HD/HQ Skype access requires the latest software (Skype and Webcam drivers), dual core or higher CPUs, a supported camera and bandwidth. Skype will ramp up to HD/HQ if the previous is satisfied and their is available bandwidth AND CPU. It can take 2-5 minutes to ramp up to 1080P even on a local 1Gb/s LAN. Also, Skype will NOT ramp up to HD/HQ speeds unless the Camera is supported at these speeds.

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2. 28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

   
   Finally an upgrade to the C910, February 24, 2012

   By 

   ~Z~ Amazon Verified Shopper (Western New York) –
   
     
   
     
   
     

   This review is from: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920, 1080p Widescreen Video Calling and Recording (960-000764) (Personal Computers)

   Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What’s this?)

   

   Customer Video Review Length:: 4:40 Mins

   Please disregard my “Spanglish” accent in the video review.

   I have to admit I was delighted to hear that Logitech had come out with a newer version of C910. I could not wait to try it and post a review. I knew this review would not compare to the video review I did for the C910 since there was no way my dogs were going to come in on “my” own terms. If you have no clue what I am talking about you need to see the video for yourself at this link: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910 (I had dark brown hair back then). When I did the video review for the C910 I just talked about the picture, lighting and sound quality. Pretty much all of that stayed the same with a few minor enhancements. So this time around I wanted to show the some of the fun “extras” the webcam comes with like avatars, fun fillers and video mask effects.

   I understand that with time you need to upgrade and make improvements, but I wanted to understand and “dissect” the changes Logitech made with the C920. First thing I noticed was that the C920 is quite smaller in size. I posted several pictures on the product page so you can see the size difference. I wondered if the size variation would interfere with the dimension of the image that is captured or the quality of the sound because housing around the lens and speakers is smaller and more condensed. To my surprise, the picture and sound looked and sounded great. I was pleased it has a 6-foot long cable – great for a desktop computer, not so great for laptops. The cord is actually a foot longer than the C910. The camera sits perfectly on my 23-inch screen. The C920 has a “new” tab located underneath the front of the webcam. This allows the camera to sit more securely in place without worrying it will fall backwards or slide forwards Another great feature the C910 did not have is that it is tripod mountable.

   The C920 has 15 MP compared to 10MP on the C910. Let’s talk about mega pixels a little bit. The resolution of a picture/image is represented by its mega pixels aka MP. The higher MP the larger you are able to view or print an image. Typically an 8MP resolution allows you to make an 8×11 photo quality print. If you try to make it large, your image quality will start to get worse and become blurry. In general smaller MP are great for Internet postings because most of the time you crop and edit pictures to make them even smaller. So how important is that the C920 is 15MP compared to 10MP? I guess it depends on what you are using it for. If you need to post or print a 15×20 or larger picture than 15MP will be great for you. This is not important to me since I do not use the webcam to print out or post HUGE pictures. The only pictures I might post using the webcam are silly looking “duck face” pictures on social sites. If I need to take photos, I will just use my digital camera. This webcam is primarily used to video chat with friends and my family.

   Please be aware in order to get 15MP quality pictures you must use the enhanced software Photo Capture which is included in the download – just like it is with the C910.

   Now lets talk about Full HD 1080p with H.264. I have heard of 1080p but what is H.264? I did some research. There are three different types of high definition modes: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. The 1080p is the only full HD. It is able to display a native resolution of a least 1080 lines, the higher the number of lines the sharper the image. The “p” means that the screen display images very quickly by completely refreshing the screen with every frame. This allows quick movements to display in sharp detail. Now let me explain H.264. The H.264 is best known as being the codec standards for Blu-ray discs. It is widely used by video streaming sources such as YouTube, Vivmeo, iTunes, Amazon and web software such as Adobe Flash Player and Apple QuickTime. So what does this all mean – it allows you to be viewed in 1080p in a clearer, faster, smoother and high definition (as long as the “viewer” has good quality equipment as well). The C920 does video processing in the webcam as opposed to the C910 using the computer’s central processing unit. This means less lagging and hesitation on your system since everything is going on in the webcam – that makes a very big difference in framerates in HD quality.

   Installation was simple. I am using it in a Windows 7 Home Edition 64-bit OS environment. This webcam does NOT come with an installation CD. You must go to Logitech’s website and download the software. The web address can be found in the instructional booklet. It only took less than 1 minute to download the file and about 2 minutes to install the software. The webcam was up and running in less than 3 minutes…

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