AVerMedia PW515 4K Ultra HD Webcam Review: High Quality, High Functionality

With the PW515 4K Ultra HD Webcam, AVerMedia delivers what it claims is “the world’s most intelligent 4K webcam”. However, with quality comes cost. Here we break down the PW515 so you can differentiate it from the competition.

Although visually undemanding, the PW515 is the swiss army knife of a webcam. A center microphone and a stellar 4K Sony STARVIS CMOS sensor are integrated into the sleek gray and black exterior. If your office lacks a webcam, this is a great place to start.

Out of the Box

The PW515 comes in a small cardboard box as tall and wide as a webcam. Inside you’ll also find a 2m (6.56ft) USB-A to USB-C cable. There is a small handy quick start guide on the underside of the box lid. Setting up the PW515 is pretty self-explanatory – the back of the camera has a free slot for a USB-C cable to connect to a computer.

For mounting, you can use either the built-in universal mounting clip or the quarter-inch threaded stand. Both screws and clips have protective rubber pads to prevent scratching. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with a desktop stand, so you’ll need to purchase a quarter-inch stand separately to suit your needs.

The AVerMedia PW515 does not appear extravagant; the camera itself is encased in a rectangular plastic exterior that looks and feels good enough and seems decently durable. However, for $249 I expected more. It comes with an attached view blocker when not in use, but that’s about as far as the bells and whistles go.

Overall, I would say that the building is perfectly serviceable. It’s not overly impressive, but it doesn’t look like the kind of cheap webcam you’d find on the shelves of electronics stores. At just over 5 inches wide, 2 inches deep, and 2 inches tall, it is wider than it is tall. Unfortunately, the camera’s low height makes it a bit awkward to use freestanding, so you’ll want to mount it to a monitor or stand.

Competitive camera

The PW515 features a powerful 4K Ultra HD camera that uses a 4K Sony STARVIS CMOS sensor that automatically brightens and filters noise to produce an incredibly accurate image. This webcam has a wide field of view at 100 degrees, and when tested on a Windows 10 PC, it produced sharp and clear images even in low light.

Colors look natural, and even when shooting in a dark room, the PW515 keeps things surprisingly clean. It definitely offers impressive 3D noise reduction; I had to deliberately mess up the image with different levels of light and reflections to make the quality sink. The PW515 tries to find your face and focus on it, so if you’re sitting front and center like on a conference call, you shouldn’t see any problems. But if you’re in a larger, dimly lit space, things start to get muddier—though not by much.

What’s particularly impressive is how it does this without having to open any additional software. The PW515 comes with AVerMedia’s CamEngine, but you’ll only need to work with it if you want to customize your experience. I found the default settings worked well, but it’s always nice to have more options.

AVerMedia’s CamEngine

AVerMedia’s CamEngine (available for Windows and Mac) provides a basic set of options with some wiggle room for more advanced users. Notably, the program is linked to AVerMedia’s free membership service, so some options, namely virtual backgrounds and ePTZ (Electronic Pan Tilt Zoom), are blocked.

While membership is free, these options should be accessible to anyone who has purchased the product – especially ePTZ. Without an account, you can’t edit your shot in any way. The PW515 can pan, zoom and tilt digitally, but you won’t be able to do that without giving Avermedia more information.

Beyond that, you’ve got everything you’d expect to find: fine-grained control over focus, brightness, and the layout of your webcam capture, along with a variety of filters and backgrounds—things you’d find on Snapchat or any number of other video services.

While CamEngine is perfectly functional, services like Zoom already provide many of the background options you’ll find here. If you need to create a two-screen layout in a pinch, CamEmgine is great. But as mentioned earlier, many of the features here will also be found in the video chat services you’ll be using. So there is some redundancy.

Center microphone

The PW515 has a built-in microphone with acoustic noise reduction, but it’s not impressive. This model uses dual omnidirectional stereo microphones, which means it picks up noise from all around, as opposed to the space directly in front of it, like a cardioid microphone would. These speakers are located on top of the webcam.

A unidirectional microphone is preferred for a webcam as you will likely be sitting directly in front of it. With an omnidirectional microphone, your webcam will pick up any random noise outside your window.

Actual sound quality is similarly lackluster. Voices come through compressed and somewhat crunchy. It doesn’t feel like a massive leap over the average microphone, although even having one is a big plus for those who need it.

AVerMedia PW515 4K Ultra HD Webcam: A solid, multi-purpose buy

If you’re looking for a quality webcam, the PW515 is a good choice. The quality of the camera itself adds a lot to its value, but it’s arguable that the addition of a microphone pushes its price too high for people who don’t need it. Compatibility with both monitors and camera stands is a huge plus, ensuring it fits into your office.

It’s also absurdly undemanding; just plug it into your computer and it works. The built-in firmware manages the image well enough, but if the image bothers you for any reason, you can adjust it yourself via CamEngine 4.

On the downside, the PW515’s clip isn’t the strongest. It kept falling off my monitor every now and then, and having to give AVerMedia your information to unlock camera features is frustrating, but not that big of a deal.

All in all, the AVerMedia PW515 is a high-quality webcam that not only produces a professional, high-quality image, but also doubles as a decent microphone. If you need a 4K webcam and don’t already have a microphone, you’d do well to pick one up.