Mosonth 2K QHD Webcam Review

As working from home becomes more and more common, we’re all realizing that the webcams in our laptops are not very good. Depending on the brand of laptop you have, you might have an experience that ranges from fine to terrible. The world of USB webcams is where you may turn after that. However, the world of USB webcams is quite broad, and you may not get one that’s particularly good. Here we take a look at the Mosonth 2K QHD Webcam on our quest to find the perfect work-from-home setup.

First Impressions

Opening the box, you’re greeted with just the bare essentials and nothing else. This is kind of nice, but there’s something about the experience you get when you’re opening a really high-quality product and the unboxing experience matches what you’re hoping for. Think like an Apple product – everything feels nice, and you’re welcomed by the box to start using your product. No such luck here, but it’s a fairly inexpensive webcam at $29, so I’m not sure what I expected.

It’s an extremely lightweight webcam. That can either be a good thing or a bad thing – I see it as a good thing because the general use case is that you either put it on top of a monitor, which is a sensitive piece of equipment anyway, or you’re going to use the included tripod, which benefits from the light weight for stability.

User Experience

The user experience is a bit of a mixed bag. The camera itself does exactly what it says it will in terms of its resolution, but there’s a pretty significant issue when you ask it to record or try to position a photo with it: it stutters like none other. If I had to guess, it’s probably one to two frames per second at full resolution on my Dell Inspiron 7580 using Intel UHD 620 graphics on Fedora Linux and Windows both.

It’s nearly unusable. For reference, the video quality on my integrated webcam and my Logitech C270 (which costs $2 less) is markedly better. The video quality for Zoom meetings in particular was stellar on the C270 even at 960 x 544 px. I couldn’t get the video to smooth out until I got below the resolution of the C270, starting at around 640 x 480 px, and even then movement is still wobbly. Given that they list the use case in the manual as, “Online meeting, Online course and so on,” I hoped for a stronger showing in video conferencing.

That’s not to say that you might not have a better experience on a more powerful machine. However, when working from home, most of us are using a laptop of some kind, and while my Dell Inspiron is from 2018, it’s no slouch. I’m using it here as an analog of most of the company-issued laptops people are working with.

However, when you do get a photo lined up, the quality is great. It’s a 4-megapixel camera, which is almost certainly better than the 1-megapixel cameras that come baked into most laptops. Everything looks more crisp, and while it’s hard to portray in these images, it’s a noticeable quality improvement over the integrated webcam and my trusty Logitech.

The microphone is nothing to write home about, but given the use case for video conferencing, you’ll probably be using a headset anyway, or you may have a better microphone for better audio quality.

Overall, I’d say that this webcam works fine for what it is. It’s particularly suited for those who are looking for a webcam for still images, or if you’re willing to significantly drop the resolution for video calls.

Check out more webcam reviews here.