Insta360 has really taken the camera space by storm over the last few years, releasing more appealing action cams than the likes of GoPro and really showing that its AI tracking capabilities are second to none.
This has never been truer than with the Insta360 Link webcam, which offers a 4K webcam experience on a gimbal that really takes the guesswork out of looking good on camera with some really innovative features to boot.
Let’s strip away all the extra features and just talk about the Insta360 as a standard webcam for the moment. My big issues with most of the webcams that I’ve tested is that they don’t often adjust automatically between lighting and require a lot of adjustment to look good, but that’s not the case with the Insta360 at all. I haven’t needed to touch this webcam once from a brightness and contrast point of view.
The Insta360 Link supports 4K capture at 30FPS with it also having HDR/60FPS at 1080p and 720p. It’s great in low light thanks to its larger sensor and the webcam is also super quick to focus if you’re wanting to show off things in front of the webcam.
Whilst I’d recommend the Insta360 Link over any other webcam, from a quality point of view, this is really only where the fun begins, with this webcam offering way more than what initially meets the eye.
The Insta360 Link is on a gimbal meaning that you can control exactly where it’s looking without physically having to touch the webcam itself. Using AI tracking, you’re able to turn on face tracking with automatic zooming (if you like). It works absolutely flawlessly, and I was consistently amazed at the webcam’s ability to track me around the room and immediately pick me back up as soon as I walked back in.
There’s also a number of other modes including DeskView, which points and works some insane webcam magic to adjust what is on your tabletop and present it on screen in a way that looks natural.
You’re also able to easily put the webcam into whitehead or overhead mode which will use AI to recognise a white board and zoom in, or a drawing/plans on your desk and zoom in and frame those.
You’re also able to make the webcam go into portrait mode (using the clever gimbal system) for filming videos that live on TikTok or other platforms that work better with a native portrait video.
The webcam also does a great job at recognising hand gestures, which can be used to enable AI tracking, zoom in and out on a face and to enable whiteboard mode, so that if you’re presenting and want to move between your face and the whiteboard, you can do that without having to awkwardly go back to your PC.
Privacy might be a concern for some particularly when this webcam clearly has smarts, but it cleverly will point downwards (denoting the fact that the webcam is no longer being used) when not being used for 10 seconds or more, which I really appreciated.
The microphones on the webcam have dual noise-cancelling capabilities, making them a lot better than your standard computer microphones and making them more than a viable option for video calls.
The only slight issue I had with the Insta360 Link, is the fact that it would often change my resolution based on whichever app I was using, although I’m not super sure it made that much of a difference given most video calling platforms won’t take advantage of 4K, but I often felt that it dropped even lower than 1080p, and wouldn’t revert back without a quick manual adjustment.
Overall though, if you’re somebody who is taking a lot of calls from home, or wanting to live stream, even though this webcam is $569, I feel fairly confident you won’t regret the decision in purchasing an Insta360 Link.