The AVerMedia Mingle Bar is equipped with an unspecified all-glass, fixed-focus, ultrawide lens with a focal length of 1.86 mm, f/2.4 aperture, and a specified focus range of 50-500 cm. The diagonal field of view is 124° (115° horizontal, 79° vertical) at 1x zoom. The lens supports up to 4x digital zoom, which is what the camera uses for the AI Framing feature. The camera uses the Sony Starvis 4K CMOS sensor, capable of capturing video in 4K resolution (3840x2160) at 30 FPS. Higher framerates aren't supported, even at lower resolutions.

On the audio front, the Mingle Bar has dual omnidirectional microphones with a specified pickup distance of 4 meters (13.12 ft) and an integrated 5 W mono speaker.

Picture Quality

In this video, you can get a general sense of the picture quality of the AVerMedia Mingle Bar. As my house is going through renovations, I'm using my brother's kitchen as an improvised home office. I did my best to emulate a scenario that the Mingle Bar is likely to find itself in: capturing video in a room with a combination of artificial and natural lighting while sitting on top of a monitor. As you can see in the video, the picture quality is very solid, even in a difficult setting like mine, with blue kitchen cabinets giving a hard time to the automatic white balance algorithm. With no digital zoom applied, the picture is fairly sharp, even close to the edges of the exceptionally wide shot. The shot is so wide that some lens distortion around the edges is inevitable, but there's a good reason for that: the Mingle Bar aims to comfortably capture multiple people sitting in front of it instead of focusing on just one person, as "ordinary" webcams do. To see what picture settings you can play around with and in what way they impact the picture quality, please check out the video above.

In good lighting conditions, the Auto Exposure mode is the best one to use, as it finds a good balance between shutter speed and ISO. However, in lower lighting, things take a sharp turn for the worse. The Auto Exposure algorithm doesn't seem to be able to adjust the camera settings properly, completely blowing out the bright details in the process and introducing a noticeable amount of motion blur. This can be solved by switching to Face Exposure mode or by adjusting the exposure and gain manually in the Manual Exposure mode.

The AVerMedia Mingle Bar also includes a High Dynamic Range exposure setting. While it should be avoided in most cases, as it won't do anything good to the image quality, there's a single scenario where it might be useful: when you can't avoid having a lighting source directly behind you. In this scenario, the HDR exposure setting will keep you out of the dark. In the video above you can see an example of Auto Exposure and High Dynamic Range exposure settings in one such scenario. Of course, this feature should be observed as an emergency fix more than anything else. If at all possible, avoid having a light source directly behind you when using this or any other camera.

The Mingle Bar offers the so-called AI Framing feature. The idea behind it is to automatically track one or more people in the frame. In my video, you can see that it takes the camera a couple of seconds to find a person and zoom in on them. The camera uses digital zoom for the AI Framing feature, so the more it has to zoom in, the more image degradation is to be expected. The feature can be turned on and off with a hand gesture, which is a nice touch, but the camera doesn't reset to 1x zoom (or no zoom, to be exact) after the AI Framing is turned off, which would be a nice addition to gesture control. It's also worth mentioning that the Mingle Bar doesn't offer a feature that would zoom in on a person that's currently talking like its direct competitors do.

Microphone Quality

The AVerMedia Mingle Bar uses dual omnidirectional far-field microphones with a specified pickup distance of four meters (13.12 ft). You can hear their quality in all of the video samples on this page. In the video above, I'm testing the pickup distance. As you can hear, it reaches far beyond the specified four meters, which comes as great news to anyone who's considering using the Mingle Bar in larger rooms.

The AI Noise Reduction feature reduces background noise and is a must in noisy corporate environments. The feature is implemented well and remains very useful in all three available settings: Low, Medium, and High. Since it adds occasional artifacts to my voice when set to High, I'd recommend sticking with Low and Medium settings in most scenarios, but if you find yourself in very noisy surroundings, then having the High setting at your disposal will definitely come in handy.

Speaker Quality

The Mingle Bar is equipped with a mono 5 W speaker. According to the technical spec sheet, the speaker utilizes some sort of bass enhancement, although I didn't observe any such feature in practice. The bass is pretty much non-existent on the Mingle Bar. The integrated speaker sounds very thin and tinny and can't really be used for anything other than basic voice communication or perhaps a short YouTube video. It's not nearly good enough to replace a half-decent set of PC speakers or a compact soundbar of any sort. For a remotely larger huddle room, you'll definitely want to output sound to more powerful speakers. The integrated speaker can only be considered for solo usage and smaller meetings. I can't shake the feeling AVerMedia could have done more with this aspect of the Mingle Bar – I ran into many small soundbars that sound much better than the Mingle Bar does.