Good afternoon dear community members!
Today is the 5th day of self-isolation and I really want to share something interesting. I decided to describe my experience of moving to a home mode of work due to the lack of quarantine introduced in the country and the organization of my remote working web office.
The purpose of the article is tell how I tested a working solution for quickly organizing a video conference to reach a team of 12+ people offline.
Article audience - leaders of small companies and team groups who periodically face the need to organize full-fledged communication in a group of 3+ people and are tired of looking into the laptop camera to say something.
My build:
- The Jabra Panacast is a 4K camera with a 180-degree field of view,
- Jabra Speak 710 is a speaker with a microphone
- Tripod DIGI 2 - found in the bins,
- Notebook Macbook Pro 13 2017,
- The ZOOM program was originally Hangouts, but the limit of 10 people did not suit us.
For those who love unboxing (like me)
The camera is in a classic box made from recycled cardboard, which is nice. The plastic is less than in the Chinese packaging of the protective glass for the phone - bravo!
Inside the minimum set of waste paper:
The USB 3.0 cable is apparently very heavily shielded, which is why it resembles an antenna in rigidity π If there is no tripod, you will encounter a situation where the tail wags the dog - the camera will bounce on the table along with the laptop.
The camera itself is very small, almost the size of a credit card and light, so it was transferred to a USB-C cable from a MacBook, which is softer and longer.
Itβs even easier with the column, the column itself, instructions and warranty:
This is my second Jabra Speak 710 speaker - I bought the first back in 2017 and it flew half the country with me and held more than a dozen meetings. I must say that it is made according to the highest standards - indestructible, the top is made of metal, in the center there is a large broadband speaker. It is very pleasant to hold in hands.
There is a built-in leg, as well as a USB dongle, which, as I understand it, allows you to connect it to old computers without bluetooth - I never even took it out myself.
Installation in the system - who caresTo install, you need to install a single Jabra Direct application, after which it will automatically find all native hardware
From the interesting - the application allows you to update the firmware
Deep settings are only available for the camera
There is one bug or feature, decide for yourself - if you download another application from the site ,
then the set of settings will be slightly different and it will be possible to turn off the Intelligent Zoom, which is sometimes useful, which I will write about later. It is strange that this cannot be done in Jabra Connect.
In addition, for some reason, in the Panacast program, the Vivid function is offered as a paid one, but apparently already paid for by Jabr, since it is activated% -)))
The test is
Office
Quarantine was announced on March 30, so testing was carried out in an emergency office mode - March 27 - on Friday, just before the weekend before the quarantine week. We instructed remote staff on how to work from home, set tasks, installed RDP.
I didnβt have time to prepare a tripod, so I installed it in a product sample :)
Wow effect of course on the face, connected to a 4K DELL monitor - even its width was not enough to display the picture in full growth - these 180 degrees are so long.
The camera automatically zooms in on the person who is currently speaking - this is very similar to the Cisco conference system of our senior partners. The only negative or feature is that the autozoom could not be turned off in the Jabra application, but it can easily be turned off in the Panacast application - how so?
The colors are very vibrant and balanced, the dynamic range is very wide. At some point, I caught myself thinking that I was trying to justify the invested 80+ thousand rubles, but no - the matrices of the cameras are really very worthy, colleagues from that side at Cisco also noted the quality.
The loudspeakers were paired with each other using a wireless protocol and worked in pairs. But it should be noted that even one speaker would be enough for our office, which cannot be said about the microphone. The microphones are not as sensitive as we would like, so two speakers for a given table length turned out to be optimal.
The speakers hold a charge for about 4 hours, no wires - only hardcore.
House
Home testing is not as "wide", but more tube π
I placed it on the dining table, especially for the backlight, in order to evaluate how my new camera copes with this light.
My new office for 17 people.
Corner width comparison:
Conventional chamber width
Width full Panacast (sorry for the quality of Yandex.Screenshots shrugged)
Of course, such a width is not needed in self-isolation, the camera itself brings it closer if there is no one around.
By the way, the camera has its own microphone, quite efficient.
I noted that the camera heats up noticeably during operation - somewhere it constantly stays at 45-50 degrees, I donβt know why, but if there is no charger at hand, then the laptop battery will melt 30 percent faster than usual - this must be taken into account.
Results
Pros of my build (in my opinion):
+ quick unpacking and installation from the box 5-10 minutes with software,
+ the small size of the camera allows you to organize a conference call anywhere in any office,
+ 4K video quality,
+ a single ecosystem of sound + video, no conflicts and freezes,
+ simply perfect studio sound.
Cons:
- the camera heats up noticeably - read converts electricity into heat,
- you can not turn off autozoom in the native program,
β relative high cost of the solution for microbusiness.
In general, I evaluate the solution as quite niche, but right on target. Companies like ours, where up to 100 people work, and office staff up to 30 people, is probably the ideal target audience for such devices. The camera at the time of writing the article cost 88200r, one column 13500r. A similar Cicso solution flies for 200k+ and the search for a specially trained person, well, or figure it out yourself. Logitec has something similar - but there is a mechanical camera like in a movie about the Wally robot - I thought - there is a risk of turning her head when we often move between offices.
On my own behalf, I would like to wish the manufacturers of this Panacast - to build a battery into it for at least 1,5 hours in order to finally get rid of a bunch of wires and not depend on a laptop, and that would be a complete bomb!
ps you can't live without cats
Source: habr.com