My home office videoconferencing setup is pathetic. For a person who reviews laptops, monitors, webcams, and other home office tech for a living, that shouldn't be possible. But it is.

The reason is simple: Getting a decent videofeed isn't as simple as dropping some cash on a new webcam or on a new laptop with a better webcam. Take it from me—someone who is not exactly a professional videographer but spends enough time in video calls that I thought it worth investing in improving my appearance. My mind immediately jumped to the same conclusion I assume everyone has: Buy a new webcam, right? As I learned in my testing, though, it's not always that straightforward.

Drawn to the Light

I spend most of my time using the built-in webcam on laptops, largely because I'm a laptop reviewer and I'm constantly switching machines. Once upon a time, laptop webcams were completely irrelevant, happy to stay at 720p resolution forever. Things have improved since the rise of remote work, but I'm not about to call the standardization of 1080p a victory.

Laptop webcams struggle in low light, have poor image processing, and are then compressed by videoconferencing apps. The best in low-light performance is still the 12-megapixel 1080p camera in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, while the 4K webcam in the Dell XPS 14 has the best sharpness. Both, however, still struggled in my office. The clarity wasn't there, and the camera was often forced to overexpose light sources to brighten up my face or left me as a ghostly silhouette haunting my weekly meetings. In particular, I'm talking about the two windows in the back of our office. They let in an absolute flood of natural light during the day, backlighting me and throwing my face in shadow. Not great.

The easiest (and cheapest) thing I could do, of course, would be to move my desk next to the window. All of a sudden, the light isn't shadowing me, but falling on my face. I recently stayed in a rental house and took a call in a gloriously-lit office nook by a window. I popped open my laptop and saw the true potential in even a low-quality webcam. It's such a significant difference that simply relocating should be the first order of business.

Here's the problem. We have two young kids at home, and we live in the city in a townhouse that isn't exactly large. With that comes a lot of “shared space”—also known as partially controlled chaos. The room that we have colloquially named the “office” is hardly a dedicated work space. I couldn't survive without the blur background function in Zoom and Teams. The closet is a storage space, and in addition to our standing desk, which is typically filled with laptops, monitors, laptop stands, and various peripherals I'm testing, we also have some nonwork items throughout the room. Some of those include a play kitchen, bins of toy food, an entire crate of Duplos, a modular play couch, and an ssortment of other pokey things that hurt to step on.

Moving isn't an option—at least, not an easy one. I could certainly close the blinds, but that's also where my 5-year-old displays his Lego creations. And doing so also leaves me exclusively with terrible track lighting on the ceiling—which, again, is behind me. It's a mixed-use room, and I’m sure some of you can relate to the limitations that creates.

I'm back to buying a webcam. After all, an external webcam doesn't have to stuff all its parts into a tiny camera module that's squeezed into the top bezel of a screen. Maybe it's wrong to expect much from these tiny laptop cameras in the first place. I gathered every possible webcam I could find. There are tons of options out there, ranging from cheap 1080p cameras up to spending hundreds of dollars on 4K options with AI features. But I was less concerned with specs like resolution, megapixels, aperture, and field of view, and simply found myself wanting to improve the dismal situation I faced in my office.

Lights, Camera, Action

Nearly all of the dozen webcams I tried out looked great while under ideal lighting. I spent some time working in a different room next to a window, and the upgrade to an external camera felt significant. With all that light to work with, the higher-end cameras with a larger 1/1.3-inch image sensor handled the situations beautifully. It didn't need to blow out the direct natural light to get details in my face, showing a wider dynamic range of shadows and highlights. Having more natural light in the room improved just about every webcam I tried, but they also better showcased just how powerful some of these higher-end cameras really are, such as the Insta360 Link 2C Pro or Obsbot Tiny 3. These are the scenarios most webcams are tested in, leaving them all looking more or less adequate.

But I've got the horrendous lighting needed to really put them to the test. So back to my home office I went. As I set up each webcam over my monitor, one after another, I couldn't help but be disappointed. With the flood of natural light behind me, most of these cameras were forced to rely more heavily on image processing to light up my face—and you can tell. The image gets noisy and blurry, and the light is forced to flatten out. Some, like the Razer Kiyo V2, overexpose the image and wash out the background too much.

My favorite webcam of the bunch, the Insta360 Link 2C Pro, did the best job of not completely blowing out the highlights from the window. It even has a natural background blur, thanks to the large sensor. It was a huge improvement, and yet, it did not transform my poorly lit office into a professional studio. It's no fun spending $200 on a webcam and still be left with an unflattering image.

Taking one more step forward in quality would require not only a new webcam but also some extra lighting. A simple key light or ring light can brighten my face and the foreground to hopefully balance against the harsh light coming from my window in the background. Unless you're a professional content creator, though, buying lighting for your desk is a frustrating proposition for remote workers. Now you're adding another expensive accessory into the mix. I also find having lights blaring on your face to be very uncomfortable.

I tried out the Logitech Litra Glow, a smaller and more affordable light. The $50 light clips onto my monitor right next to the webcam, and isn't as involved as getting a full-on key light. I like that this didn't take a permanent spot on my desk too. And bam, just like that, my webcam feed was finally starting to look decent. It wasn't perfect, but combining a basic light with a powerful camera was enough to overpower the terrible lighting of even my own office. The light alone even helped tremendously with my testing on the built-in webcams. The truth is that in most cases, you won't be getting the most out of your camera unless you add some light on your face.

If you happen to find yourself in a similar situation to mine, you could just buy the Insta360 Link 2C Pro and Litra Glow, and call it good. But that would also cost $250. I can say one thing for sure: Plan in your budget to buy both a light and a webcam. A basic USB light doesn't need to be expensive, but it's a must if you want to actually fix your video in a poorly lit room. You can drop the price of the light and the webcam accordingly, but trust me: you'll want both.

Or better yet: Hey, just bite the bullet and move your desk. If you're willing to do it, it's worth a try to save yourself hundreds of dollars.

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