The return to the office has been unrelenting, but that hasn’t slowed brands down from releasing new products for content creation to enhance your streams and virtual meetings. The Obsbot Tiny 2 is a unique little webcam – and I mean that literally. At less than two inches square, it’s as unobtrusive a webcam as we’ve seen that offers 4K resolution and advanced features like AI framing. At $129.99, it’s a great value.
Obsbot Meet 2 – Design and Features
The Obsbot Meet 2 is designed to fade into the background of any environment. It’s tiny, measuring only 1.78 x 1.4 x 0.87 inches, smaller than a large paperclip. It’s unobtrusive compared to many other webcams, and that’s especially impressive for the kind of quality it offers. At the same time, Obsbot has aimed for style with three different colors available at launch: white, gray, and teal. It’s minimalist, but in an Apple-esque kind of way that’s nicer to see perched upon your monitor.
The simple, sleek design lets the lens take up the majority of its front. Two pinholes signal the dual microphones it houses on either side. In the upper corners is a small Obsbot logo to the left and an LED to the right that indicates when the camera feed is on. The only other design feature is the USB Type-C port on the back and a ¼-20 mounting thread on the bottom.
Even with its minimalist design, there are still some interesting aspects outside of its tiny build. For example, it uses magnets for mounting to its monitor stand, so there’s nothing to screw in. The same goes for the lens cover, which is a bit less appealing since it’s incredibly easy to lose. The chassis is metal and conducts heat away from the camera’s internals. It gets warm but was never hot to the touch. It comes with an angle-adjustable monitor mount. The magnets inside the camera are surprisingly powerful – it snaps in place and doesn’t move on its own. Making small adjustments can be a bit finicky, however, as it’s hard to avoid touching the camera and shifting its angle when you’re adjusting the mount.
The internals of the camera are respectable for the price. It uses a 1/2-inch CMOS sensor, which is significantly larger than what’s in typical webcams, and is paired with an f/1.8 aperture lens. Together, they allow the camera to gather more light so it performs better in darker scenes, as well as provide a small amount of natural bokeh (depth of field). In practical terms, this design means you won’t need to keep a ring light on for every meeting just to avoid looking dark and grainy.
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Spec-wise, the camera can record video up to 4K30 or 1080p60 with or without HDR. It has a 79-degree field of view, which is narrower than competitors like the Logitech MX Brio and Elgato FaceCam Pro (both top out at 90-degrees) but it’s still wide enough, similar to the kit lenses packed in with mirrorless cameras and DSLRs. The FoV also stops short of image warping (a distortion that comes from a wider FoV), which is nice because that’s usually a dead giveaway that you’re using a webcam. I don’t mind it, but if you’re looking to show off a lot of your streaming area, this may not be the camera for you.
Where Obsbot pulls ahead is with its AI features and software. Obsbot leans heavily on AI in its cameras – I know, the most overused term of 2024 – but it’s actually used to good effect here. Within the software, you can enable smart object tracking. This isn’t uncommon by itself, but the Meet 2 allows you to designate the type of shot, or even the part of your body, you would like it to track. Looking for a pulled-back view so you can present standing up? There’s a toggle for that and the shot will adjust its FOV under its maximum range to capture your upper body. Looking for a punched-in headshot for your face cam? It’s one button away, and the camera keeps that subject centered in the frame, even as you move around. It’s also able to recognize when multiple people are in the frame and adjust if one of them should walk away.
There are also some fairly excellent picture and beauty enhancements you can apply. The best of these is adding background blur while the AI engine intelligently tracks you and ensures you remain in focus, leaving the background blurred. It’s leagues better than the built-in blurs in Zoom and Google Meet. If you look close, you can still sometimes see where the transition happens. But for the most part, it’s something you need to actively look for to notice, and is implemented very well overall.
Similar to Snapchat and countless photo apps, you can also apply an array of cosmetic filters. Skin smoothing, coloring, eye size, and more can all be adjusted. It’s not revolutionary or something I would ever use personally, but I could definitely see others finding this to be a useful feature. When used in moderation, the enhancements are pretty convincing.
Elsewhere in the software, you’ll find a wide array of picture settings. Simple sliders allow you to adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpening, color temperature, and exposure compensation. You can set focus manually or leave it set to auto. If you’re familiar with camera settings, you can even manually adjust the ISO (100 to 6,400) and shutter speed (1/30 to 1/6,400s). There are also options to capture in portrait or landscape modes if you need vertical video.
The autofocus is one of the best available in a webcam today. It uses phase detection, similar to Sony mirrorless cameras, and can reliably swap between your face and something held close to the camera within just a few seconds. It can also be set to focus on faces or have it apply to objects in the scene more universally, and in face latch mode, the swap back from the near-held object is almost instant.
The Meet 2 also comes with a pair of omnidirectional microphones for capturing audio. They’re on the quiet side but offer good clarity and detail. Sitting about two feet away, people on the other end of the line reported that they could hear me very well. In test recordings in Audacity, it never approached the level of a standard desktop mic (-12 to -9dB when properly configured). But, there was also a minimum of ambient room noise. There’s a trade-off there, but they are high quality for built-in webcam mics.
Obsbot Meet 2 – Performance
The Obsbot Meet 2 is a great camera overall, offering great picture in most situations. With halfway decent lighting and the bokeh effect applied (lightly), it could pass as video from a mirrorless camera. That’s high praise for a webcam that only costs $130 and is as portable as it is.
When I test webcams, I start with three different lighting scenarios: well-lit, normal room lighting, and low light. For the well lit scenario, I have two key lights bouncing light from the ceiling and walls, a normal lamp, and a third light off-scene in the back. The “normal” scene involves a single floor lamp in the corner of the room and the light from my monitor. The low light scenario is completely dark except for whatever illumination is shed from my monitor.
With good lighting, the Meet 2 shines – it’s crisp and clear. At 4K, you can make out fine details in my hair and beard, and my cat’s fur. The white balance, saturation, and contrast are all very good, creating an accurate image. With just a lamp, it still performs very well. This image is still accurate and really doesn’t lose much detail at all.
Turning off all of the lights brings about the expected graininess, but it still offers a surprising amount of detail and accurate color. The 6,400 maximum ISO and ½-inch sensor allow it to gather enough light to still be very usable. Exploring this mode, I also realized that the camera cannot drop to anything lower than 30 FPS, so motion remains smooth as well. In the same scenario, more common webcams for streaming like the Logitech C922 become very blurry with any kind of motion. It’s less of an issue on modern 4K webcams, especially those with STARVIS sensors like the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra, but they’re usually significantly more expensive.
Its HDR implementation is a bit more mixed. It usually just seems to brighten the image and drop some of the contrast so it appears flatter. For the most part, I like the picture better with HDR turned off. Under bright lights in SDR mode, hot-spots of skin glare can sometimes be an issue (like most webcams). HDR mode tends to cut these out and lead to a more balanced image, so it has its uses.
I mentioned it up top but it bears repeating here – the autofocus on the Meet 2 is phenomenal. It can be set to Global or Face modes, and under both settings, you can still hold objects up and the camera will shift focus. The big difference is that in Global mode these focus changes are almost instant whereas Face mode tries to hang on your face for a few seconds and is only instant when returning. And crucially, the close-up detail it can deliver is excellent.
The biggest disappointment is how it integrates portrait mode. Instead of cropping the image to 9:16 like you would expect a social media-friendly mode to do, it just adds unsightly black bars on the top and bottom. A letterboxed landscape isn’t what anyone has in mind for portrait mode.
It also isn’t great with handling bright background lighting. In the most challenging scenario, where you have sun shining in a window behind you, exposure drops as low as possible, leaving your face obscured in darkness. This is a hard scenario for any webcam, but it’s a key situation you’ll want to avoid.
And if you demand a built-in privacy shutter, you’ll need to look elsewhere. It comes with a lens blocker, but it’s a small magnetic disk that will almost certainly get lost over time. It’s better than nothing but it’s certainly no integrated shutter like the MX Brio.
