Dell UltraSharp Webcam WB7022
A high-quality 4K webcam with Windows Hello login support, but do you really need the extra pixels?
SCORE
PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from dell.co.uk
4K webcams such as the Dell UltraSharp aren’t common, and there’s a good reason why. For most people, a 1080p webcam is good enough; although it sounds attractive on paper, the vast majority of us don’t need 4K. Still, the extra pixels give you flexibility to crop more closely into the frame without losing quality and, if you harbour ambitions to become a YouTube celebrity, the more pixels you have at your disposal, the better.
The other reason you might want to pause before investing in a 4K webcam such as the UltraSharp is the price, because cameras like these tend to be much more expensive than their 1080p counterparts. The UltraSharp will set you back £180, and its main rival, the
Logitech Brio ( see issue 273, p71), is similarly expensive. The best 1080p webcams we’ve tested, on the other hand – such as the Anker PowerConf C300 ( see issue 324, p70) and the AVerMedia PW315 ( see issue 321, p72) – tend to cost £100 or less.
The UltraSharp includes a few more extras, however. Aside from being incredibly solidly made – the barrel is constructed from metal and both the lens and its protective element are made from glass – it comes supplied with a monitor mount and a separate tripod adapter.
Each of these is also made of metal and docks neatly into a rectangular, magnetic cavity on the webcam’s underside, making it easy to swap between the two. The webcam itself comes with a 2m cable. This isn’t captive but, since the port on the camera is inset, it might as well be – take note because if you lose the cable you’ll have difficulty finding another that fits. Among the webcam’s other key features is support for Windows Hello facial recognition login, which is quick and reliable.
There is one major feature missing, however: the UltraSharp has no built-in microphone. We would always recommend that you use a dedicated USB microphone or a headset for your calls, but it’s always nice to have a built-in microphone for emergency use. With a Sony Starvis CMOS sensor sitting behind the UltraSharp’s autofocus lens, picture quality is, as you might expect, excellent. Video is captured at 3,840 x 2,160 at up to 30fps with a default field of view of 90°, and the image looks crisp and detailed. It’s good in low light, too, and although noise creeps in when the lights are dimmed it’s not particularly distracting, even when the image is cropped.
The default colour balance isn’t great, lending skin tones an overly pink hue, but the accompanying Dell Peripheral Manager app gives you the option to tweak things. There’s a selection of presets to choose from (Default, Smooth, Vibrant or Warm), plus the ability to adjust brightness, sharpness, contrast and saturation. Handily, once you’ve arrived at your ideal setup – I found all the default presets to be oversaturated – you can save your preferences as a preset.
That’s not all, though. Via the app, you can also apply HDR to the image, which balances out areas of light and dark nicely, and adjust the field of view. For the latter, you can select between 65°, 78° and 90°, adjust the zoom by hand using a slider, or choose “AI Auto Framing”, which detects your face and then keeps it centred automatically.
In testing, the tracking worked well, following my face smoothly and reliably. There’s a small delay of around a second before the frame moves, but no sign of distracting hunting back and forth as I saw occasionally with the Anker PowerConf C300.
Obviously, I’d like to see an integrated microphone (how much would it have cost Dell to stick one in?), but there are a couple of other irritations. The first is that the monitor clip doesn’t offer much in the way of positional flexibility. You can tweak the vertical angle by tilting the webcam back and forth but there’s no horizontal tilt or swivel adjustment, which seems bizarre on a webcam this pricey.
The second is the privacy cover, which instead of being integrated into the unit is a separate, magnetically attachable disc. Let’s face it, you’re going to put this down at some point and forget where you had it last, at which point your webcam loses its privacy shutter. Not great.
The Dell UltraSharp delivers high levels of image quality for a webcam and it’s one of the few that also supports Windows Hello facial recognition. The big question is: do you really need 4K? The short answer, for most people, is no. A 4K webcam is overkill for video calls – in fact, most services don’t currently support 4K – and a decent 1080p camera such as the Anker PowerConf C300 or mid-range Logitechs will serve you perfectly well.
The only reason you might want to splash out is if you like the idea of being able to digitally zoom in to keep the frame clear of messy clutter; otherwise, just stick with 1080p.
SPECIFICATIONS
4K Sony Starvis CMOS sensor 4K streaming at 30fps 1,920 x 1,080 streaming at 60fps 65°/78°/90° field of view 42 x 70 x 42mm (WDH) 112g (camera only) 3yr limited warranty
“The big question is: do you really need 4K? The short answer, for most people, is no. A 4K webcam is overkill for video calls”