Eyeball 2 Eyeball
Samuel Gibbs goes hands, eyes and ears-on with Blue’s latest HD webcam, the Eyeball 2.0, and finds it wanting
Having loved the Blue Yeti a couple of weeks ago, we had high expectations for Blue’s latest webcam replacement, the Eyeball 2.0. Featuring Blue’s excellent USB microphone technology, and a retractable 2MP webcam, on paper the Eyeball 2.0 is an excellent upgrade to the stock web chat solution built into most modern laptops and monitors.
On the design front, the Eyeball 2.0 is a nifty little package, fitting neatly into a slide on hard shell for transport, while the pop-out camera is pushed into the side of the microphone out of harm’s way. Connection to your PC is made via an included mini-USB cable, which unfortunately is too big to be stored inside the case to save from losing it, and is worth replacing with a slimmer third-party cable that will.
Attaching the Eyeball to a thin monitor or laptop screen is easy, simply looping the frame over the edge and letting it sit securely on the top edge of your screen. The camera and microphone have adjustable angle and can turn side to side to point directly at you. If you want to put the Eyeball on a thicker screen, Blue provides a slide-on rubber wedge that frankly looks a bit dodgy, but does the job well enough as long as there’s a sharp edge to the back of your screen.
So setup is easy, it’s a nice and compact package, but how does it handle? Well here comes the kicker – the audio as you might expect is spot on, a world above what you get with your built-in mic, or even most headsets. The video on the other hand is atrocious. Its slow refresh rate, poor low light handling and blocky artifact filled quality are truly poor. Blue boast HD video as one of the Eyeball 2.0’s selling points, and while it may be HD resolution, there’s nothing high definition about the quality of the video. The built-in camera of my cheap Dell netbook was far better. Frankly the Eyeball 2.0’s camera reminded me of something that was available 5 years ago, over saturated and dealing extremely poorly with motion.
It’s real shame if I’m honest, because the mic is really quite good, but the package is marred by the rubbish camera, and for that reason alone I can’t recommend it, especially at the £50 asking price.
