Logitech MX Brio Webcam Review

LOGITECH MX BRIO – THE BOTTOM LINE

The Logitech MX Brio is a high-quality webcam that can shoot 4K video at 30 fps and 2K video at 60 fps with crisp and vibrant picture quality. It also has very good low-light performance owing to its wide lens. It is suitable for professional streamers and content creators.

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Introduction

It has been around 25 years since webcams have been around. In those 25 years, Logitech and only Logitech has been consistently the staple/go-to brand one would go for without braking a sweat. To Logitech’s credit, even today when there are so many portable camera companies, Logitech has remained as the default choice in webcams. Even today, it seems Logitech is one of the handful of companies innovating in this segment. And no matter how iPhones Apple sells, webcams are here to stay, and so Logitech.

Logitech’s MX series, famous of offering premium peripherals like keyboards (the great MX Keys) and mice (MX Anywhere, MX Master 3S etc.), has a new entrant which is the MX Brio, a premium webcam that costs ₹24,000. MX is Logitech’s flagship series, offering the latest and greatest in innovation and features by the company. All MX products are expensive, but the pricing has for the major part been justified. We’ve been rocking an MX Anywhere and MX Master 3 mouse since two years and they both are stellar products!

Logitech MX Brio – Features and Build

The Logitech MX Brio is a premium webcam that has a Sony STARVIS 4K HDR sensor and a wide f/2.0 lens with 4K 30 fps capture capabilities. You can even do 60 fps video recording at a resolution of 1080p. It also sports a microphone array and a nifty feature called show mode. Its casing is fully aluminium and it definitely looks like a premium product. Having a webcam of such capability can enable many use-cases that can add value to your profession and/or business.

The MX Brio has a heft to its weight and is even quite meaty in its proportions. This gives the feeling of a proper heavy device, unlike those plasticky webcams we’ve been so used to seeing that would fall off from the slightest air-kiss. The MX Brio, with its full aluminium casing attached to a circular glass-covered lens, looks like high-end webcam, a sight that onlookers will notice for sure. The perfectly round lens casing is circled with a rotatable ring that controls the privacy lid of the MX Brio. The mechanism of the ring feels rather satisfying and can serve as a stress reliever (?).

The webcam comes with a mounting clip that you have to stick to your monitor. The heavy camera unit sticks to the mounting clip via magnetic energy, something on the lines of the iPhone MagSafe charger. That means, the magnetic snap is pretty powerful and sturdy, and you won’t have to worry about your expensive camera snapping off its clip. You have to remove the adhesive film from the mounting clip and stick it on the back of your monitor. The mounting works well but we have doubts if one has to change monitors, will the adhesive still remain?

The magnetic holder, once attached, is able to rotate horizontally and tilt vertically with ease. Logitech has provided an excellent USB-C cable that is thick and sturdy, just like the camera. The cable also acts as a counter-balance when tilting the camera to use its “Show Mode”.

Should you ever feel the need to mount the MX Brio on a tripod; and that you certainly will, since this is a high end camera that can be used to vlogging even; there is threading available in the MX Brio underneath the magnetic mount.

Logitech MX Brio – Camera Sensor and Lens

The MX Brio is a follow up to Logitech Brio 4K, and the company has stated that the MX Brio has 70% larger pixels than the Brio 4K. The Sony Starvis sensor is used in high-end webcams like the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra and HyperX Vision S, and is capable of excellent picture quality, especially in low light conditions.

Paired with the Sony Starvis sensor is a f/2.0 lens with a 90-degree field of view that can be cropped down to 78 or 65 degrees. an f/2.0 aperture is quite wide and this means the the MX Brio can capture a good amount of light to capture the image with minimal noise, thus the outstanding low-light performance of this webcam.

The MX Brio’s HDR works spectacularly. To be honest it is rather overwhelming to see this level of HDR performance in a webcam. Note that the camera’s HDR performance can only be appreciated in a monitor that supports HDR. The MX Brio is a deep focal plane and can clearly differentiate between the subject and the background, allowing for smooth effects that can work really well in video-conferencing and game streaming. If the lighting is done right, the MX Brio can make for a very good vlogging camera too.

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Software

The Logitech MX Brio is aimed at a wide audience: not the college-going type, but the millennial work-from-home / game streamer / Zoom caller / content creator type. This is the reason why, if you are familiar with Logitech’s Windows app space, you will notice that the MX Brio works with the entire Logitech app suite: Logitech G Hub, Logi Option + and Logi Tune apps. All the apps can do basic adjustments to the webcam, like crop, toggle auto-exposure, auto-focus, auto-white balance, HDR, low-light compensation and Show Modes. But there is always the one thing which isn’t available in one app and you need to use to other one to use that specific feature.

Logi Option + is an app meant for basic home office usage. It has a simple and straight forward interface that supports the MX Brio webcam and other Logitech accessories. The Logitech G Hub is meant for gamers and streamers and supports various mic and recording modes. The Logi Tune app is the only app among the three that supports the auto-framing feature called RightSight, which keep the camera digitally zoomed to your face as you move around. The feature is a hit and a miss. It works when it feels like. Logitech will surely release updates to sort this bug, like we have seen them do in the past for their other products.

While the Logitech apps work just fine, it would have been better if Logitech had just one app that did it all. Especially if you’re using more than one Logitech product, you’re bound to use atleast 2 Logitech apps, which will require to launch at startup and subsequent, and update regularly. So it would be great if Logitech could just streamline it all into one universal app.

A strong point of Logitech’s software suite is its amazing compatibility and performance on both Windows and OSX. Infact, we would say that Logitech software works much better in OSX than in Windows. The camera performs great in Apple’s Photo Booth app. In Windows, third-party software like FineCam can exploit the MX Brio’s lens for some amazing AI features, green screen, chroma correction and many more things. It is still surprising why this 4K camera does not support Windows Hello.

Microphone

We are so used to seeing webcams with generic microphones, it is so refreshing to see the MX Brio with a proper dual-array microphone setup. And no, these are no generic mics, their circuitry is more sophisticated than that of generic mics. Probably this is another reason why the MX Brio is heavy. Logitech, with its recent takeover of Blue, the microphone company, has been producing outstanding mics, and the MX Brio is victim to this takeover. While certainly not branded as a “Blue” microphone like in the Logitech G Pro and G Pro X headphones, the microphones in the MX Brio do sound refined, detailed and rich, like a Blue microphone.

The microphone, coupled with fiddling around with the G Hub software has the potential to be your companion not only for video calls, but also for game streaming and voice recording. It should be made clear that this microphone is not a replacement to a proper, dedicated professional desk microphone.

Is the Logitech MX Brio Webcam worth ₹25,000?

Now that we’ve explained all the features of this webcam to you, do you think the MX Brio is worth its rather steep asking price? Let us answer this question for you. First and foremost, if you’re just looking for a webcam for video conferencing, the MX Brio will be an epic overkill. A ton of cameras that cost a fraction of the MX Brio will suffice for that purpose. This webcam is targeted towards streamers and content creators who are looking for professional grade sharp and crisp picture quality, use cases that go beyond general video conferencing.

The Logitech MX Brio offers 4K resolution, a wide lens, privacy shutter, good microphones, a healthy suit of apps, and with that, supremely durable and long lasting. That is pretty much the Logitech offering – consistent across its product range. Our Logitech MX518 mouse is going strong even after 15+ years. No other mouse has lasted us that long. Our Logitech C270 Webcam is 10+ years old and used regularly, still works just like the day it was unboxed. Many people don’t talk about this, but Logitech products are durable and built to last, barring a few exceptions.

The MX series products command a price higher than their counterparts. The MX Brio webcam costs around ₹6,000 more than the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra, which offers the same camera module and a wider lens (f/1.7), but the MX gets a better build quality, better mounting, a better 4K USB C cable. The MX Brio is also significantly costlier than Logitech’s previous flagship webcam, the Brio 4K, but the MX Brio offers a better 4K sensor that is more sharp and works better in lowlight. Overall, the quality makes the MX Brio’s price justified.