GESMA Webcam with Microphone Review

This article contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Buckle up for this one as I review (expose?) one of the best selling webcams on Amazon, the “GESMA Webcam with Microphone”.

- What’s in the box
- Price
- Specifications
- Image Quality
- Focus
- Audio
- Verdict

What’s in the box

The GESMA webcam comes with:

- a webcam
- an instruction manual
- an Amazon gift card offer (more on that later, stick around)

Price

I bought the GESMA Webcam with Microphone (Amazon) for $35. This makes it the cheapest webcam I’ve ever purchased. This also provides a partial explanation of why it has been able to sell so well.

Specifications

- 1080p, 30 FPS
- USB 2.0 cable. 58 inches in length. Only works with 2.0 ports.
- 110 degrees field of view (listed, not really 110)
- Manual focus only (adjustable lens)

Upon seeing the 110 degrees claim on the box, I decided to challenge this assertion by comparing it to the widest field of view webcam I have, the AVerMedia PW513. That webcam has a listed 94 degrees field of view. Here is the result.

GESMA

AVerMedia PW513 (white balance wasn’t set)

You can see more in every direction on the PW513 and without the extreme fisheye effect created by the GESMA webcam. The 110 degrees FOV claim is simply false.

Image Quality

Below will be a demonstration of 4 different lighting scenarios:

- Night time with a room light
- Night time with studio lighting
- Day time with daylight only
- Day time with studio lighting

This webcam does not have manual exposure and gain settings, but it does have adjustable white balance and manual physical focus.

Night time with room lighting only (full auto)

Daylight only (manual white balance, focus, sharpness)

Night time with studio lighting (manual white balance and focus)

Daylight with studio lighting (manual white balance and focus)

Overall, the GEMSA webcam doesn’t look very good, but it has a couple bright spots. There’s lots of artifacting in low light, but the image is still pretty bright with just a room light. With studio lighting, the webcam forms an aura around me which is quite distracting and it moves when I move. You can see this better on video.

The colors are either blue or yellow. No matter how you tweak the white balance, there’s no in between. Somehow the image is overall worse than many laptop webcams. The initial shots I took all looked just as blurry as the first image, and that can be explained by this webcam’s curious focus mechanism.

Focus

The GESMA uses manual focus only and you can adjust it by physically twisting the lens. Really cool concept since it’s just like a “real” camera. Out the box, this device might be completely blurry and if you never change this, it will stay like that!

However, the focus is still not great in practice for two reasons.

First, the webcam clip itself doesn’t fit snugly on any monitor. It doesn’t have a tripod thread either if you wanted to hook it up to something more sturdy. This means twisting the lens will force you to completely readjust the device every time you change it.

Secondly, the GESMA actually makes your image too sharp, if that’s possible. I’ll show you what I mean. These images will be larger than usual to demonstrate detail.

GESMA out the box focus (night time, studio lighting)

GESMA manual focus (night time, studio lighting)

The second image is indeed clearer but there’s way too much definition in the image. My freckles seem to be popping off my face rather than being a subtly, slightly darker color. Every object in frame also has a cartoon like outline. This look can be mitigated by lowering the default sharpness slider in OBS from its default value.

Overall, this is a bit of a jank focusing system, but with this knowledge you can get a somewhat workable image from this device.

Audio

You can’t expect much more than muffled audio out of a webcam, no matter what the price. This one is no exception. The sound is bad. Here’s an audio clip to demonstrate.

Verdict

I do NOT recommend the GESMA Webcam with Microphone. The image quality is terrible, the colors are wack, the field of view listed is exaggerated, the physical design is bad, and the device froze on me several times.

Somehow, this still topped the charts as the best selling webcam on Amazon at the time I did my recordings. How? Paid fake reviews. The seller is offering Amazon Gift cards of up to $15 for 5 star reviews. No wonder it has so many.

If you’re looking for some webcams that are actually good, I’ve reviewed and compared some of the best webcams on the market in this article.

GESMA Webcam with Microphone: https://amzn.to/3oAgcZ0