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Autofocus of the Logitech C920 webcam in Linux

Logitech C920 HD Pro

In a previous post I wrote about how I set up my webcam on Linux. It turned out it was actually suffering from random disconnects which made it very unreliable for professional video calls. I also couldn’t get more than 0.5 fps if I recorded with it, so I switched to the (very expensive for what it’s worth) Logitech C920 HD Pro.

Too expensive

The Logitech C920 does have its advantages:

  • It works on Linux out of the box
  • It doesn’t seem to randomly disconnect (so far)
  • Allows recording 1080p at 30 fps

But apart form that I actually find its video sensor inferior to that of the cheap Chinese webcam:

  • The contrast is off no matter what I do
  • The colors seem artificial (although with enough tuning of the saturation and white balance temperature you can get something decent)
  • The viewing angle is large, not extra large

It also lacks some features with respect to the cheap Chinese webcam:

  • It doesn’t swivel (if you want to rotate it, you have to rotate your screen)
  • It doesn’t come with a privacy shutter
  • It doesn’t come with a tripod

But I guess this is the “package” you get when buying into a “reputable” brand like Logitech… anyway, I digress. The real issue is…

Bad autofocus

The autofocus on this webcam is horrible! I did myself a favor and promptly turned it off. With the v4l-utils package installed, do this (assuming your Logitech C920 is /dev/video0):

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v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-ctrl=focus_auto=0
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-ctrl=focus_absolute=0

Add the above lines to a script to run automatically each time you log in (put it in /etc/profile or add it as one of the scripts to run in /etc/profile.d/). If the image is not sharp enough, you can also alter the sharpness parameter (see below).

Other settings

To see the other settings that are available for the Logitech C920 webcam:

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v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --list-ctrls-menus

You can manually tune the brightness, contrast, saturation, white balance temperature, sharpness, exposure and gain settings with v4l2-ctl. The pan and tilt don’t seem to work.

If you need a graphical user interface, you can use guvcview.

Conclusion

All in all it’s not a bad webcam. I just wish the sensor was as powerful as the one in the Chinese webcam but without its stability (random disconnect) issue.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.

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