Logitech has officially launched the Logitech Reach, a new type of webcam designed expressly for making it easy to offer a range of views of you and the area around you. With its flip-up, sliding horizontal arm, it can provide an overhead view of your desk or you can twist and turn the camera to face any direction needed.
Originally launched as an Indigogo campaign last year, over 2,100 people backed the campaign to the tune of $607,780. As a result, Logitech has now officially said it’ll put the product into production. We got hands-on with the intriguing new best webcam contender at CES 2024, to see what the fun/fuss is all about.
The key to the Reach is that it uses a desktop-mounted arm, a bit like you’ll find used for many higher-end gaming microphones. However, instead of bending like those arms, the Reach maintains a fixed upright position, only rotating in its base until you press the large silver lozenge-shaped button at its top. Press this and you can flip out a whole other arm at 90° to the main upright. Press the button again and you can slide this arm up or down or slide the camera forward and back.
The end result is the ability to very quickly and smoothly switch between presenting yourself to camera or presenting what’s on your desk or all around you. On the end of the second arm, the webcam can easily spin so that you can maintain your framing and it can tilt too.
Something similar could be achieved with a conventional articulated arm but the Reach makes it easier to more smoothly transition across its fixed horizontal and vertical arms and the rotating camera head makes reframing easier. It’s also a much more compact arm arrangement overall.
The webcam itself is just Logitech’s own Streamcam, but currently Logitech isn’t offering the Reach as a standalone upgrade for existing Streamcam owners, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to us. The camera offers 1080p video recording/streaming, records audio (unlike the Corsair Facecam, for instance), and uses a USB-C connection.
Our first impressions of the device were largely positive with the arm system striking a good balance of compactness with range of motion. As mentioned above, conventional spring or gas-dampened articulated arms are quite bulky but the Reach packs up very small – it can also be mounted on a weighted desktop mount (as well as a desktop clamp mount), which most articulated arms can’t.
We did note two immediate potential issues, though. The first is that the camera can’t reach any higher than the height of the main vertical part of the arm. In bendable arms, they can hinge upwards but here the fixed right-angle design means you only get up to 60cm of height above your desk at most – my Rode microphone arm reaches to 80cm. One advantage here though is that the cabling does all pack very neatly into the movable arm of the Reach, whereas manual cable management is required for most 3rd-part arms.
The other issue is the webcam quality. It’s fine as a 1080p webcam but for anyone looking to step up to using this setup as an easy overhead camera for uploading to YouTube, the quality isn’t a patch on some higher-end 4K webcams or dedicated camera rigs.
That latter point is a bit of a sticking point when you consider the pricing of the Reach. The Logitech Reach price is set to be $349.99 when its release date arrives this summer. The Streamcam alone is $139.99 and most competing 1080p webcams are a similar price but that’s still a lot for the arm. Still, this is again a particularly slick solution and we’ll reserve full judgment until we get one in for a full in-depth review.
For now, though, we want to know what you make of the Logitech Reach. Does it seem like the ideal fit for your workflow or would you require something more akin to a professional overhead camera setup? Let us know your thoughts on the PCGamesN Facebook and X pages.