The Ultimate Webcam?? Insta360 Link 2 Pro Review (+ Link 2C Pro)
These are Insta360’s newest webcams, the Link 2 Pro, and the Link 2C Pro. They can both shoot at 4K, 30 FPS, both have plenty of AI features you may or may not care for, both care about your privacy, but of course THIS ONE has a freaking camera gimbal! Unsurprisingly, these are pretty pricey, but they are also remarkably good, so let’s take a look at these things so you can work out if you are willing to pay the hefty price tag!
Let’s start with a look at them. The 2C is the smaller one with the USB C connector right on the back. You have an activity LED in the middle, and the large mic array up top. You do also have a privacy switch on the side – it’s important to note that this is a hardware shutter, and does not report to your computer that you’ve shut it off, meaning the mic can still be active even if the camera can’t be. You of course get a mount for the top of your screen – it’s magnetic and has decent tilt adjustment too. As for the 2, that’s the one with the gimbal built in. Your USB cable connects on the bottom of the gimbal, and otherwise you get 180 degrees of movement in both pan and tilt. Fun! The camera doesn’t have a privacy switch – although the camera points itself straight down when not in use so it’s about as good as you can get there. You get the same mic array up top, although this one has a much larger activity LED ring instead of the little dot in the 2C.
The camera itself is the same across both the 2 Pro and 2C Pro – it’s a 1 over 1.3 inch sensor, an upgrade over the 1 over 2 inch sensor in the older 2 and 2C – with an F1.9 aperture, and it’s equivalent to a 24 millimeter lens. You get an 83.9 degree field of view, again up from 79.5 degrees on the non-pro versions, and they even come with dual native ISOs of 100 and 3200. As for resolutions, that’s up to 4K30 or 1080p60, on both. That’s pretty crazy for a webcam! Of course the specs are one thing, but what do they actually look like in use?
First off, since both have the same microphone I want to mention that, damn this is remarkably good. Considering this is a mic strapped to the TOP of a webcam that is otherwise much further from your face than a regular mic might otherwise be, this is impressive. More than good enough for conference calls where your mic is muted 95% of the time anyway! As for the image quality, well again both are the same so I’ll use the 2C as my stationary example. On the face of it this is remarkably clear, crisp and sharp. Especially at 4K, you get, on first glance anyway, an amazing image. For video calls? This is overkill. Seriously overkill. Upon closer inspection though, and really we are talking about using this for livestreams or recording videos now rather than video calls, the image is actually remarkably noisy and grainy. Punching in even a little bit shows that noise and grain easily, which is a bit of a surprise considering just how much light there is here in my studio. This should be absolutely optimal conditions, and yet, it is still noisy and grainy. Low light really isn’t bad either!
It’s also worth talking about the natural bokeh, or seemingly lack thereof. There isn’t much in-camera blurring of the background – certainly a lot less than an F1.9 lens would suggest. The autofocus does work really well, it’s pretty fast and snaps back to your face real quick. One thing that both of these have though is an incredibly wide field of view. It isn’t quite fish-eye, but it isn’t exactly a tight shot. Again you can zoom in digitally, but it isn’t exactly pretty. You definitely feel far from the camera, despite being remarkably close.
Of course both feature person tracking, although the 2C basically zooms into the static frame and then moves the window around, which to me is remarkably jarring and a little queasy. This doesn’t feel comfortable to watch, at least for me.
As for the gimbal, well that makes a pretty massive difference. This is smooth and natural, if a little delayed. It’s silent as it moves, and it tracks you worryingly well. Seriously, this thing is incredible at keeping you in the middle of the frame. Personally I’d like some more options for this, like when I stream I have the chat on the side so I like to take up two thirds of the frame so the other third can be the chat. As far as I can tell anyway, there isn’t an option to change where in the frame you want it to track you to. There are a pretty crazy number of options though, including filters – which do freeze the video when applying them so bare with me as I show you some. Oh, and the makeup filters, all of which work worryingly well, only work at 1080p, not at 4K, and the bokeh filter requires an NVIDIA GPU to work. Fun times.
Obviously the biggest catch for these things is the price. The little one is £200, and the gimbal adds £40 for £240 total. That is a LOT of money for a webcam. Like, to put that in context, Elgato’s 4K streaming webcam is £180, and their ‘premium 1080p’ one is just £104 right now. Over £200 is a lot.. And it isn’t quite as amazing as you might think. It’s great, but it’s not as crisp as you’d like, and especially for that money? I don’t know. I mean my streaming setup, a Sony A5100 with the kit lens and an Elgato Cam Link does a great job, and isn’t all that much more (used, anyway). Let me put it this way, I couldn’t justify that much, but I’lll leave it to you – can you justify it?
