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Nov 15 2024
Hardware

Review: Sony SRG-A40 Conference Camera Enables High-Quality Remote Lectures

This smart camera follows speakers around the room and keeps them in focus.
John Breeden II
by

John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer with more than 20 years of experience covering technology. Follow him on Twitter @TheLabGuys.

As interest in remote learning at colleges and universities remains high, the capabilities gained and lessons learned in recent years can be used to provide access to students in remote locations or to capture key lectures to be studied later. And while the earliest attempts at recording or streaming within classrooms were low-resolution projects with poor production values, new tools can help elevate the quality of any lecture to that of a professional presentation. The challenge is to make that process as automatic and seamless as possible.

That is what the Sony SRG-A40 conference camera is designed to accomplish. Built as a turret-type camera that can rotate, tilt and pan in any direction, it can be mounted to the ceiling of a lecture hall or attached to a stable rolling cart for sharing between classrooms. It’s capable of recording or streaming feeds up to 4K at 30 frames per second, so it can produce film-quality output. But the most impressive feature of the Sony A40 is its embedded intelligence, which almost feels like having a full production crew running the camera feed and requires very little actual human intervention.

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Sony SRG-A40 Keeps Speakers In Focus No Matter Their Location

Educators only really need to power up the Sony A40 and possibly select one of the camera’s 256 preset positions to begin. But they really don’t need to select anything at all: The A40 comes with a wide-angle lens that can cover a large part of most classrooms or lecture halls.

It can also automatically pan, tilt and zoom to perfectly focus in on a presenter if told to do so. And once a lecture begins, it can keep tracking speakers as they move around the room, keeping subjects in the frame and perfectly in focus. The feed can be streamed through an HDMI or an SDI cable depending on the school’s video equipment and setup. The A40 can also send its feed through both cables at the same time if needed.

 

Automatic and Manual Controls Lead to Impressive Presentations

While the automatic features of the A40 are impressive, users are in no way locked in to using them alone. There is an impressively complex set of controls that gives access to advanced features while also enabling fully manual operation. Those controls can be accessed either by using the included remote control or through an app on a networked computer.

Almost any presentation recorded by the Sony SRG-A40 is going to look good, both in terms of image quality and presentation. And professors don’t have to be videographers to make that happen. They can concentrate on teaching their lessons and let the Sony camera do all of the hard work involved with the presentation or video stream quietly and automatically in the background.

SPECIFICATIONS

DEVICE TYPE: Mounted smart camera for conference rooms
MAXIMUM RECORDING RESOLUTION: 3,840 by 2,160 (4K Ultra HD) at 30fps
AUTOMATIC FEATURES: Pan, tilt and focus on any speaker
ZOOM/CAMERA ANGLE: Up to a 40x zoom with a 70-degree wide-angle lens
CONNECTIONS: Power over Ethernet cable, HDMI/SDI output
DESIGN AND WEIGHT: Turreted design for mounting to a stand or ceiling, 4.4 pounds

Lights, Camera and High-Quality Action

While the Sony SRG-A40 is designed for ease of use in classrooms, the camera itself is extremely high quality. It can even be driven using a network TV camera control panel.

Despite the fact that most of the major functions of the Sony SRG-A40 conference room camera can run automatically, there are also quite a few features just under the surface to really boost production values if users want to dive into them. In fact, you can connect the A40 to an RM-IP500 remote control board and drive it exactly how you would a broadcast television camera. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an RM-IP500 board in the lab, but I was able to experiment with the A40’s advanced features using both the included remote control and an app running on a connected laptop.

Using the remote control that comes with the A40 is extremely easy. You can use the arrow keys to move the camera around, and other buttons to do things like zoom in and out. The camera is extremely responsive and quick, so there is no perceptible delay when entering commands.

The only feedback that you get when controlling the camera with the remote is through the video feed, so you need to have some way of watching it, either through a monitor or a laptop. Working the controls that way is fairly intuitive, and you can do things such as zoom in on specific people in a large panel when the automatic functions of the camera would not know which presenter was the most important one to focus on at the time.

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The computer app also allows for some degree of manual control, but it seems more useful in assisting the automation to make good choices. For example, you can let the camera automatically focus on whoever is speaking but tell it through the app to concentrate only on each speaker’s face.

Between the remote control and the app, users have a lot of choice over how the camera performs and what it records. With enough time and training, a talented operator could probably do an even better job at putting together a professional-looking stream or presentation compared with the Sony SRG-A40’s automated systems.

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