Products like the AVerMedia Mingle Bar are surprisingly hard to rate. To a person looking at it as an ordinary webcam, it seems shockingly expensive, with a price tag of $600. On the other hand, when compared to its direct competitors, like the $800 Poly Studio R30 and $900 Logitech Meetup, the Mingle Bar turns out to be an affordable option. Either way, this definitely isn't an ordinary webcam and shouldn't be considered as such. The Mingle Bar is an all-in-one conference webcam, mainly targeted for office/enterprise environments and educational entities. The idea behind this product is to provide a complete videoconferencing solution, one that can be used by multiple people at once.

For that exact reason, the AVerMedia Mingle Bar is equipped with an ultrawide lens and a decent Sony Starvis 4K CMOS sensor. When combined, they provide a good picture quality in proper lighting conditions. Most meeting rooms are purposefully built in a way that lighting isn't an issue, so the Mingle Bar shines in such surroundings. In darker rooms and more challenging lighting conditions, you can still get solid picture quality from the Mingle Bar, but you might have to resort to manually setting the exposure, as the Auto Exposure algorithm starts to get confused and tends to introduce motion blur and completely blow out details like human skin.

For a device like this, microphone quality is arguably even more important than picture quality. That comes as good news for the AVerMedia Mingle Bar, as its microphones proved to be very good both in terms of voice clarity and pickup range. As you can see in one of the videos on the previous page of this review, I was able to get great results far outside of the specified pickup range of the integrated omnidirectional microphone array. I also achieved good results using the AI Noise Reduction feature, which does an excellent job of filtering out the background noise.

The Mingle Bar has several other things going for it. It has a nice multipurpose stand; it supports multiple mounting options, and AVerMedia even equipped it with an Ethernet port, an HDMI output, a USB Type-A port for peripherals, and a 3.5-mm microphone input. These ports give it expandability and turn it into a handy docking station, as you can use a single USB-C connection to your laptop to get the video signal, Ethernet connection, and peripheral access from the camera.

The only aspect where the Mingle Bar somewhat fails is the built-in speaker quality. It can be used in a pinch, but don't expect to enjoy the sound coming out of it. It's a weak, tinny, bass-depraved 5 W mono speaker with nothing to offer in larger conference rooms. The AVerMedia Connect app could also use an interface update, although I can't complain about its functionality.

With everything taken into consideration, the AVerMedia Mingle Bar deserves a Great Value award badge. With a substantially lower price than its direct competitors and good video and (especially) microphone performance, this is the midrange all-in-one conference camera to get.