If you were to school before the 2010s, you may have been taught with the help of an overhead projector. These giant light cannons shot photons upward through typically transparent worksheets, through a lens and a mirror, projecting the image on a screen for everyone to see. I can only imagine my teachers back then wishing they had something like Logitech’s reach to make that process much easier. Well, mostly.
The Reach is a unique product in Logitech’s line. First announced in September 2023 as an Indiegogo project and successfully funded in five minutes, it will ship to backers in July for a retail price of $350. The Reach is an articulating camera arm designed to make it easy to obtain aerial views of objects on a table while keeping your hands free. It’s useful for displaying books and worksheets in a classroom, demonstrating how to make crafts for a YouTube channel, or providing a bird’s-eye view of a board game.
The arm itself is excellent. It’s easy to tilt the camera arm up or down, extend it further from the base, and even slide it up or down off the table. It’s an ideal way to get aerial images of just about anything, except for one pretty major problem: It’s designed to work only with Logitech’s Streamcam, a webcam that’s not very good.
A well thought out camera arm
The first is the first. The arm is the star of the Logitech Reach and is an absolute pleasure to use and very simple to install. There are two mounting options: a heavy-duty clamp that attaches to the side of a desk or a heavy baseplate that you can place on top of a table.
And when I say heavy, I mean heavy, Which is a good thing. The base plate is so heavy that it counteracts the weight of the entire arm and camera, even when fully extended. This prevents it from falling or even tilting. It’s so effective that the only reason I can think of to use the clamp is if you don’t have table space for the base.
The arm slides into the base with a freely rotating metal pin that can rotate 360 degrees. The USB-C cable that runs to the camera fits so neatly into a ridge along the camera arm that it’s almost invisible. Since the camera and its cable are already set up, it only takes a couple of seconds to place the motherboard on a table, slide the arm into the base, connect the cable to a laptop, and you’re done.
The arm itself is so soft it almost seems unreal. You can rotate the upper section of the arm forward up to a 90-degree angle from the lower section without having to manipulate any controls or locks. It just snaps easily into place. Additionally, the upper section of the arm can slide back and forth, extending up to approximately 18 inches from the base, and stays in place. Again, there are no extra buttons, knobs or clamps involved.
Photography: Eric Ravenscraft