Foscam W41 2K 4MP Webcam

First off, it worked out of the box on Ubuntu Linux 20.04. I like that a lot! It's very versatile and adjusts nicely with my stand-alone monitor. Surprisingly, it even works well on my laptop screen since the anchor has just the right amount of hold-in-place tension. I hadn't expected that at all, so that's a nice bonus. It gives the anchor a good range to hold onto just about any monitor/screen with a nice adjustable angle. When coupled with the camera's ability to pivot on top of the anchor mount, there's great flexibility to achieve just about any desired angle. When I compared the video quality to my 3 year old Toshiba laptop's internal camera, it's a marked improvement! There's distinctly less noise in the video feed. The W41 also has much better low-light performance. The camera is far more illuminated and clean versus dark and fuzzy with the Toshiba internal camera. I did have a few observations: The red light was always on when plugged in and turned green when I used it with Zoom. This caught me off guard and initially I thought this was a Linux behavior (it's not, and is clearly documented in the included user manual). This is still not what I would have expected by default. Maybe I'm different than most people, but I would typically associate red with recording. That said, I'm primarily used to not having any light on until the camera is in use. I also noticed that I was able to record from my camera in VLC without the light changing from red to green. Therefore, the light change appears to be determined by the software using the camera vs firmware changing the light when the camera sends a video feed. Either way, it's not really a deal breaker as there's the physical privacy cover. I do wish the microphone had a physical kill switch or way to disable it. If someone managed to hijack the camera, there's no way to stop them from eavesdropping conversations. If I were going to engineer a similar camera, I would consider building the physical mic kill switch into the privacy cover so when it's down, nothing on the camera works. It's still better than most laptops that have no privacy cover and can't block the mic either... So not really a win or loss. It's also nicer looking than putting black electrical tape over a laptop camera. I see other reviewers complain about the lack of settings for adjusting frames per second and the 2k/1080P options. I too didn't see any option of changing the frames per second or quality on Windows or Linux. However, I didn't look too hard as I primarily use Linux and I anticipated features might be limited. I took a snapshot with VLC and the ratio was 2560x1440. That is 2K resolution. I wasn't motivated to look for anything beyond the plug-and-play drivers. The default drivers and picture are great for my purposes. As a help for anyone else thinking the quality isn't as expected. After moving from Linux to Windows, I discovered that the quality wasn't as good and the picture appeared cropped. This really surprised me because it's almost always the opposite with Linux! I soon realized it was Zoom's default settings to blame. Everything looked better after I adjusted the in-app video settings to use HD and a 16X9 ratio.