Lifesize Icon 450 and Phone HD
The price is steep, but this complete VC solution makes high-quality conferencing a walk in the park
If you like to get your hardware and software from one place then Lifesize has you covered: its Icon 450 HD camera and Phone HD speakerphone link up seamlessly with the company’s own Cloud videoconferencing service. You can use other providers if you wish, but the integrated approach gets you up and running with a minimum of fuss.
Hardware setup is simplicity itself; pretty much all we had to do was connect the Icon camera and Phone HD unit together using the 9m proprietary link cable. The Phone HD also has an Ethernet port supporting PoE, but this isn’t needed when you partner it with the camera as the link cable carries power as well as data.
We then connected an HD monitor to the camera’s HDMI port, linked it to the network and applied power. Both units automatically booted, linked together and downloaded and installed the latest firmware. Within 15 minutes, we were ready to go.
Linking the hardware to a Lifesize Cloud account was just as easy. The camera displayed a unique code on the monitor, which we assigned to our admin user in the software portal. Both units then appeared in the Video Systems page; you can also connect directly to the camera’s web interface for further configuration.
The only hiccup we encountered during setup was that the camera defaulted to sending sound to the monitor; we had to adjust this to enable the Phone HD. It’s also frustrating that the Cloud portal doesn’t support Microsoft Edge, but it worked fine with Chrome and IE11.
You can add users by using the portal to send them an email, which includes a download link for the Cloud app. We had no problem getting set up on Windows 10 or macOS Sierra, nor with our iPads with iOS 10.3. Once you’ve installed the app, registering with the Lifesize Cloud service is painless.
The Phone HD is a chunky thing, measuring 27cm in diameter, but includes a 5in colour touchscreen with easy access to all call functions. It links to your Cloud account, so when it’s time to initiate a conference, you can browse your contacts, and launch a video or audio call with a tap. When we tried this, the Lifesize app on the recipient’s PC instantly popped up, inviting them to accept the call.
In a one-to-one call, you can see your interlocutor on the connected monitor; they get a screen-in-screen view, showing the main view from the Icon camera, inset with the view from their own camera. Multi-person calls are set up via the cloud portal, and
“You can add users by using the portal to send them an email, which includes a download link for the Cloud app”
here each user sees all screens in a split-level view on their desktop. The portal also provides a wealth of information, including total calls, average call times over a given period, calls by device and overall call quality.
The Phone HD screen offers a PTZ control pad for the camera, and can store up to ten position presets. We found image quality from the HD camera was very good, with realistic colour balance and sharp focus – even when we extended the lens to its maximum 5x zoom ratio.
The Phone HD unit won’t be faulted for sound quality either. It incorporates four internal mics, and participants all said they could hear us clearly even when we moved to the far end of our medium-sized meeting room. It’s loud, too: during our testing we never needed to set the volume above 50%.
The Lifesize package is undeniably pricey, and you’ll need to factor in the Cloud subscription fees, but it’s impressively easy to deploy and use – and it provides everything a business needs to start videoconferencing, straight out of the box.
SPECIFICATIONS Icon 450 camera: 1080p 30fps PTZ 5x digital zoom 10/100 2 x HDMIvlink port 2 x USB 2 remote handset external PSU. Phone HD: 5in colour touchscreen 4x internal mics speaker 10/100 Icon link port 9m link cable 1yr RTB warranty. Lifesize App starts from £22 exc VAT per user