Microsoft LifeCam HD-5000

The LifeCam HD-5000 is one of Microsoft's latest webcams. It has a sensor that can film in 720p resolution as well as a handy autofocus. It's also good value for money.

Practical stand
The stand is a truly great feature of this webcam. It allows you to stand the camera on a computer monitor (LCD or CRT), as well as on a desk or a laptop. It's very stable too.

Good image quality ... in daylight

Image quality is very similar to that of the LifeCam Cinema. Images are smooth and fluid and colours are handled very well. The webcam also reproduces facial features correctly. Unfortunately, quality drops markedly in low light, as is the case with almost all other webcams. The HD-5000 has an annoying tendency to overexpose the picture when there's not enough light, which tends to erase detail from facial features in lighter skin tones. Your best bet is to keep a small lamp to hand.

Sound quality: excellent!

The high-quality microphone makes all the difference in the HD-5000. Sound is recorded with great accuracy, with no metallic overtone or fuzz. There's nothing else to say really, the built-in microphone is quite simply excellent.

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What does the camera really capture?

Our webcam face-off contains stills taken from the webcam in action. You can therefore compare and contrast the quality, sharpness and colours against other manufacturers' models.
The video below will give you a brief overview of sound quality, image smoothness, colour transitions and how low and high lighting levels are handled.

The above sequence shows what the webcam gives in a Windows Messenger window with ideal internet bandwidth. The flow comes directly from the source. We then host the video ourselves to avoid degradation due to re-encoding by third-party sites.