Logitech has announced the Logitech Reach, an articulating webcam intended to make for better, more interactive remote meetings, online tutoring, and livestreams. Logitech will crowdfund the camera through Indiegogo Enterprise at first, which it told The Verge in a briefing is how it will refine the design and decide on pricing. The company hasn’t announced when the campaign will start, but it may price the Reach between a “discounted” $299 and $399, per a survey on its site.
While the articulating arm is new, the camera itself isn’t; it’s one of our favorites: the 1080p, 60fps $170 Logitech Streamcam. You can replace it, albeit only with another Streamcam, but at least you won’t need to buy a whole new contraption if the camera breaks. Logitech product lead Gaurav Bradoo told The Verge in an email that the team considered selling just the mount but that most respondents in its market research would prefer “an end-to-end solution not just a mount.” Logitech plans to sell the Reach after the Indiegogo campaign concludes and it has collected all the data it needs to finalize the design and price it.
It says it will offer the Reach with choices of a free-standing base or a desk clamp. The two bases are interchangeable, and the company will sell them on their own, though there’s no word on pricing yet. Like the Logitech Streamcam, the Reach will be a plug-and-play USB camera.
The Reach seems inspired by the boom microphone stands I used on almost every stage I played on in my cool guy musician days — in a virtual briefing, Bradoo raised and lowered it, rotated it near the base to swing the arm around, and slid the arm forward and backward. To show items on a desk, he twisted the Streamcam to point at items and then panned smoothly across them.
Bradoo highlighted a particularly thoughtful design element during the demonstration: while rotating the arm of the camera, you can hold a ring built into the camera mount portion, keeping the image upright while you pan.
The smooth panning and stability seem like the big benefits here. Bradoo says the problems with articulating webcam mounts now are that most, if not all, simply don’t move the way people want them to. They can pan, but it’s hard to keep them on a steady axis without wobbling or making an arc across your content.
It was an impressive demo of a product that almost feels three years too late as companies abandon remote work. But for those whose companies haven’t made that move or streamers and vloggers who want to do more than just have a camera pointed at their faces, it could be a handy new tool.
