Best video conference cameras you can buy in 2025

The best video conference cameras on the market are generally extremely high resolution and designed to make video conferencing a breeze. Laptop cameras just don't seem to cut it these days, with poor audio and resolution, so if you want to come across as extra professional, then an external camera is the way to go.

Now, most of our picks for this list are on the premium end when it comes to pricing. These are more for office conference rooms and boardrooms, but there are individual cameras here too. If you want something a little cheaper, you can also check out our guide to the best webcams. From this list, though, our top pick is the Poly Studio P15, which doesn't put a foot wrong and should power meetings for years to come.

Conference cameras offer better video quality than your average consumer webcams, and are ideal for low-light environments or larger office calls. Check the best of them out below...

T3's Top Picks

Written by

Written by

Richard Baguley

Richard is a long-time contributor to T3 across a range of tech device types, but with a particular focus on PCs, laptops and their attendant accessories. He's tested countless conferencing solutions in that time.

Best video conference cameras to buy

Best for most people

Poly (formerly Polycom) describes the Studio P15 as a personal video bar, and that’s an apt description. This conferencing camera isn’t designed specifically to go in a conference room, but instead to sit on top of your monitor, replacing your cheap webcam with a high-end camera, speakers, and noise-canceling microphone setup.

The combination works extremely well. The quality of the video and audio is impressive, which means it can also double as a music speaker. The captured video is sharp and clear, and the auto face tracking works very well.

It isn’t as small as a regular webcam, though, so it won’t work with smaller monitors or laptops using the included clip-style stand. Instead, a tripod-style socket on the base provides an easy way to mount it.

Overall, the Studio P15 is impressive. It is missing the higher-end features of some of the other models (such as HDMI pass-through, cable security, and a stand-alone mode that doesn’t require a computer), but for most home workers or small offices, it will do pretty much everything they might need.

Best for big groups

Why have one camera when you can have three? That seems to be the approach of the Jabra Panacast 50, which looks like a soundbar that’s been attacked by a 1970s robot. Three cameras mean that the Panacast can see a full 180-degree field of view, which it then combines into a single 1080P video image. Alternatively, it can use the three cameras to track you and zoom in on your face as you move around the office.

The video and audio quality of the Panacast 50 are excellent, although this camera only outputs a 1080P image. In the wide-angle view, this is letterboxed into a 1080P image that lacks the detail of 4K cameras. However, most people don’t use 4K for video conferencing as it uses an awful lot of bandwidth, so it is an acceptable compromise.

There are a couple of other odd choices, here. There is no included remote control and it comes with a wall-mount instead of a table mount. An optional remote is available, but it is kind of essential for these devices, so it is an odd omission. Most people want a table mount to start, as you usually want to test the device out before you screw it permanently into the wall. Again, this is available as an extra-cost option.

Best premium

The Logitech Rally Bar Mini offers a lot of features for its considerable price. It has excellent video and sound quality from the large, loud speakers, so it should be at home in all but the largest conference rooms and offices.

The camera on the Rally Bar Mini pans and tilts, and an AI camera tracks you and moves the camera automatically, so you can move around the office or conference room and still be seen and heard.

The system can also be expanded so that no computer is required. With an optional touch-screen controller it can work with Microsoft Teams directly, so you can have meetings without the distracting laptops. Additional microphones are also available, but the built-in ones do an excellent job of picking up sound from around the small office already.

Best basic

If you simply want a better webcam than the one built into your laptop, the Konftel CAM20 offers that, capturing pin-sharp 4K video with excellent color and detail. In addition to offering excellent video quality, the CAM20 comes with a remote control that allows you to pan, tilt and zoom without touching your laptop.

Combine this with the wide 123-degree angle of view, and you’ve got a great way to show yourself or the things around you. You can save presets to the remote, so you could, for instance, switch from you to a view of a product you are presenting or another speaker quickly and smoothly

Konftel also offers a package with a USB hub and a Bluetooth speakerphone that expands it into a more fully-featured video conferencing system. So, if you want to start off small and low-cost, but with the option to upgrade later, it’s a great pick.

Best 360 view

This Strigiforme-inspired camera is designed to sit in the middle of a table or room, providing a 360-degree view, while picking out the person speaking with eight microphones. If you don’t want to show the whole room, the view of the Meeting Owl Pro can automatically zoom in to show just one or two people. It connects to a computer over Wi-Fi and can work with any standard video conferencing app.

The Meeting Owl Pro comes with a 6.5-foot USB cable, but the premium pack version adds a 16-foot USB cable, so the camera can be well away from the power socket. You can also connect and control the camera over WiFi, so the person making the connection can be across the room.

Best for the boardroom

The big brother of the Logitech Rally Bar Mini, the Rally Bar is bigger, pricier and more complex. It also adds larger speakers and more microphones that help it pick out speech in larger rooms. The lens is also better, with a 15x zoom that allows you to zoom in on one person from a distance. In addition, you can also add up to three external microphones that can be spread around the room. This larger version supports two external displays, one of which shows the view from the camera.

Like the Mini version, it can be used as a USB device, or turned into a standalone system with the addition of the Tap device.

How to choose

When deciding which video conference camera to get, there are a host of factors to consider. Budget is the most obvious, but also very important. How essential is a great video conferencing experience to your company or job? If it's not that necessary, try one of the best webcams instead.

If you do think that you need a wider-angle camera, though, one that could take in a whole room without any trouble, then you need to think about what sort of thing will work best for you. If you know the room in question, check that the camera you're interested in has a microphone that can take the whole thing in, for instance.

You'll also want to consider whether your choice will be wall-mounted (under a monitor or TV, for example) to provide a fixed angle, or whether it'll sit in the middle of a shared table, with a 360-degree view. That will inform the sort of conference camera you opt for, clearly.

Budget, meanwhile, should probably be your final but most important stop. These are not cheap bits of kit, and many of them are designed for enterprise use, which partly explains their prices. Make sure that you don't end up picking a conference camera that looks out of place if you can't afford it as an organisation!

How we test the best video conferencing cameras

If you want to see more about how we test the full range of products that we handle at T3, we have a dedicated How We Test page that can fill you in on our principles.

In the case of video conferencing cameras, though, it's relatively simple to explain. These cameras can only really be tested through sustained use. Their specs might give a good indication of their capabilities, but until they're used in real-life work meetings and video calls, that's all academic.

Our experts have hooked these cameras up to multiple machines to try their compatibility, along with playing with their settings to see how they can scale to fit different scenarios. Their performance has been tested not just from a user perspective, but also on the other end of calls, to see how the end product holds up.

Design is also a big factor, since you don't want to look at something heinously ugly unless it's unavoidable. Price, finally, matters too – some of these conferencing solutions have enterprise pricing, which means they're vanishingly expensive, which counts for a lot as we assess the order of our list.

FAQs

If you have some more basic questions about video conferencing cameras, you might find them answered below in our FAQ section.

What's the difference between video conferencing and using a webcam?

This can be a subtle or obvious difference depending on the device, but the main change from using a regular webcam if you pick up a conferencing device will be scale. Where most webcams are designed to perch atop a screen or laptop and capture one person during a call, conferencing cameras are generally aimed at whole rooms.

This means they often have wider fields of view to see more of the room, but also different microphone setups to capture good audio from a wider array of angles. Some of them will be able to tilt and pan around a room, even, and others will sit in the centre of a boardroom or table.

Where should my conferencing camera go?

On that topic, if you're wondering where your camera should go in a given room, you might want to rewind your planning process. You should probably have a good idea of the layout of a given conference or meeting room before you start shopping for cameras – because plenty of them will only work in certain configurations.

If you get this straight in your mind, you'll probably find it easier to discount cameras to narrow your choices fairly quickly. Once you know the possible locations for a camera, you can plan around different devices' field of view or layout.