TheHyperX Vision Sis a 4K, wide-angle webcam at a relatively competitive price point. It is also HyperX’s first foray into the webcam market. Overall, this webcam has quite good quality but numerous flaws, making for a confusing experience.
The Vision S Webcam Has Fantastic Build Quality
HyperX Vision S Webcam
The HyperX Vision S is a 4K webcam with phenomenal build quality and solid image quality. However, it suffers from poor, unstable software and finicky image quality. Too expensive for webcam callers and too lacking for content creators, HyperX’s first webcam rests in an awkward position.
Upon taking the webcam out of its box, the first thing I noticed was the weight—this thing is sturdily made from the webcam’s aluminum body to its thick monitor mount.
The webcam additionally features a well-placed USB-C port on thebottomof the back end of the webcam.
The USB-C port placement is highly thoughtful, and the USB-C cable it comes with is highly durable. However, this cable only measures 1.8m and is just a bit too short for most setups—ideally, a webcam cable should have extra slack so that bumping the cable won’t move the webcam. A cable closer to 2.5m in length would be preferred.
Last, the webcam comes with a magnetic lens cap, which is nice to have but seems highly prone to getting lost. An attached lens cap would be better and more useful.
The Vision S Has Subpar Software
HyperX uses a single software solution for all of its peripherals: Ngenuity. While we tested this webcam on both Mac and Windows, the software is onlyavailable for Windows.
The customization options include the following:
Setup is simple with the app, but Ngenuity was incredibly frustrating to use. It frequently crashed, some settings like manual focus didn’t work, and the customization options were incredibly lacking. For example, auto white balance seems to adjust for broad color correction beyond warm versus cool tones. Manual white balance only adjusted the warmth of color, and there was quite literally no way to use manual white balance to reach satisfactory color accuracy.
In general, if your webcam has good auto settings, it’s generally best to trust the manufacturer and leave it on auto. I only recommend using extensive manual adjustments if you are a content creator in a studio setting needing to match the Vision S to other cameras in terms of exposure and color settings. As such, considering the stability issues and poor functionality of Ngenuity, you may be better off running this webcam without software adjustments at all.
Funnily enough, in testing this webcam, it produced a better picture on Mac with no access to software adjustments than it did on Windows. However, all screenshots in this article were taken on Windows 11.
Overall Picture Quality Is Quite Good
Overall, the HyperX Vision S has quite good picture quality, but it looks best at 4K. At 1080p60, the picture looks both too sharp and too blurry, similar to a beauty filter. At 4K, the picture does look quite good.
Similarly, with a 90 degree field of view, this webcam may not have the very widest angle on the market, but it’s well beyond the standard webcam FOV of closer to 75 degrees, which provides high flexibility in framing.
Performance in Low or Extreme Light Is Decent
Thanks to the larger STARVIS sensor, the webcam performs quite well and has little background noise in low light, only seeing extremely noticeable noise when lights are completely turned off with only monitor illumination.
Any camera will have noise in low light, but webcams, which typically have smaller imaging sensors than standard cameras, often face background noise even in good front lighting. I was initially impressed by the lack of background noise in standard unideal lighting. The webcam performs quite well with back lighting and no front lighting at all, too.
I also was especially impressed by the webcam’s ability to handle my Elgato Key Light Air at 100% brightness—the image was not blown out at all. However, this result only occurred on Mac and could not be replicated on Windows in my testing, which was highly frustrating considering Ngenuity is Windows exclusive. Unfortunately, on Windows, with my Elgato Key Light Air only set to 30%, my face was completely blown out.
It seems it only adjusted properly if I made my room lights brighter to make the whole image brighter.
At a dimmer 10% brightness on my key light with a dimmer background, the picture is far more presentable.
It seems this webcam bases its exposure on the overall light level rather than that of the subject, so you are punished for using front key lights to enhance your image. This would be a good reason to use manual exposure, but for some reason, that feature simply stopped working in Ngenuity, even after restarting the software numerous times.
Color Accuracy Is Impressive
In our testing, we forced the Vision S to contend with some extreme conditions, and while testing with exposure and white balance set toAuto, it performed quite well, especially on macOS with no software interference.
Our first tests can be seen in the previous section, with cool, neutral white lighting for the entire image, then, with cooler front lighting and warm backlighting. Both remain quite accurate in terms of color, but skin tones are more accurate when background lighting is more neutral.
At the extreme end, I used a blue key light and set my room lights to blue too. Somehow, it accurately portrayed this scene as well.
While exposure in relation to lighting is subpar and manual white balance is completely unusable, this webcam’s automatic settings provide surprisingly good color accuracy.
The HyperX Vision S Is Confusing
HyperX released a surprisingly impressive webcam with robust features and fantastic picture quality at a price point lower than other high-end 4K webcams from Elgato, Razer, Logitech, OBSBOT, DJI, and AVerMedia.
However, it doesn’t seem to excel at anything other than build quality. Its picture is fantastic when it exposes itself properly, but other webcams have larger sensors or other better specs such as 4K60 or wider FOV, like the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra or Elgato FaceCam Pro. Other webcams from Insta360 and OBSbot offer unique PTZ tracking functions to simulate a cameraman tracking your shot. The Vision S offers no unique selling point in its functionality.
Compared to webcams at or below the $200 price point, the HyperX Vision S may have the others beat, but webcams that are only $50-100 above it offer so much more for creators with far better specs and software. Similarly, significantly less expensive webcams may not have 4K quality, but high specs are generally unnecessary for the people who buy affordable webcams: remote workers, students, and other video callers.
Additionally, the Vision S has numerous quirks in its design that webcam reviewers have complained about from other manufacturers, such as unstable software, the short cable, and an easy to lose lens cap. To stand out in the premium webcam market, these premium quality of life features should have higher priority.
Considering this, the Vision S is akin to an awkward middle child—it lacks the specs to match alternatives for content creators, and it’s too expensive for more casual webcam buyers. Creators would likely rather save up to get a webcam with better specs or richer features, whereas video conferencing users would opt for affordable alternatives.
All said, the Vision S does remain a solid webcam at its price point, but we are hard-pressed to recommend it as the best webcam for anybody.
Should You Buy the HyperX Vision S?
Nevertheless, theHyperX Vision Smay be right for you. If you need a 4K webcam, have budget constraints, and want something on the newer end, this might be perfect for you! Problems aside, its hardware is solid.
Similarly, if you are already invested in a HyperX ecosystem and use Ngenuity for other devices, this webcam may actually be more efficient for you to use than others: if you run multiple software ecosystems like Razer, Logitech, or Elgato peripherals, using all these programs can bloat your RAM and CPU usage. However, if you already use HyperX’s software for other products, you can add this webcam and customize it in software with little to no additional processing power. That said, Ngenuity was highly disappointing for this webcam.
While the HyperX Vision S webcam isn’t perfect, it isn’t a bad webcam either. It has many areas of improvement needed, but with amazing build quality and a good picture, it does the standard job of a webcam quite well. It probably isn’t exactly right for you, but it’s at least worth considering when shopping for a webcam.
