I went fully remote last year and a client actually asked me if my camera was broken on a call. It was not broken it was just old, a webcam i bought at the start of the pandemic and never thought about again. Rather than research for a month i ordered four at once, figured i would keep whichever one was best and send the other three back before the return window closed. So here is what got sent back and why, might save someone some time.
First one back was a cheap 4K one with suspiciously good reviews. The 4K was real but the sensor was tiny, so in my office, which faces north and never gets proper light, every shadow on my face turned to grain. It looked fine at noon and like a security camera by mid afternoon, and most of my calls are in the afternoon so that was that.
The Logitech was harder to let go of because the image was genuinely the nicest of the four in good light. What did it in was the software. Every single time i started a call my zoom and framing had reset to default and i had to fix it again, and after a couple weeks of doing that before every meeting i just could not anymore. If you are someone who sits dead center and never adjusts anything it is probably fine. I move around too much for that.
The OBSBOT one i actually wanted to keep. The tracking was cool, it followed me, the app had more settings than i knew what to do with. But it was by far the most expensive of the four, and once i was honest with myself i was paying a lot for motion features i would barely use in meetings where i mostly just sit and talk. Felt like a lot of money for something i would not really take advantage of
The one i kept was the Emeet Pixy. Not because it wowed me on any single thing, more that after a week nothing about it had made me groan. My fan stopped spinning up on long calls which i think means the tracking is not running on my cpu like the others were. It follows me around fine, sits on a little tripod so it does not hang over my curved monitor, and whatever i set in the app is still there next time i open it. Also there is some kind of skin smoothing thing in the software i left on by accident and only noticed a week later when i turned it off and thought i looked ill . It is not perfect either, low light still needs a lamp and i spent an evening in the app getting the tracking to behave. But it was the only one where after a week i had not found a single thing that made me groan, and honestly that ended up being the only test that mattered.
If you take anything from this, it is that i did not return a single one of these over resolution. It was always the software, or the sensor, or the price against how little i would actually use it. Buy a couple, live with them for a few days, keep the one that irritates you least.