AVerMedia Live Streamer CAM 513 4K Web Cam Review

A Closer Look & Performance

The camera does look pretty awesome, and keep in mind, it’s not particularly cheap, so I’m happy to say it does look and feel like a premium quality product.

There’s a USB-C port on the back, which you must connect to a USB 3.0 port, you cannot use USB 2.0 with this device, so keep that in mind.

It can be mounted to the top of your monitor, thanks to its built-in stand that slips out to balance/clamp it in place.

It’s pretty easy to just place it wherever you want.

However, it does have a standard tripod screw mount, so it’ll work with a vast array of stands and grips. I’ll be leaving it on a tall tripod for my testing. Well, now that we have it setup, let’s run a few tests!

The AVerMedia PW513 was updated to the latest firmware prior to testing. I have it setup on the tripod, and while it don’t tilt forward as much as I would like, you can actually turn it around backwards and use the monitor mount to add more angle. However, tilt it more than about 20 degrees and it’ll be able to see its own stand in this orientation, so use it sparingly.

The FOV on this thing is nuts, I have a pretty side desk with two monitors and an arcade machine, and it all fits in a shot from a range of just 3ft. That’s pretty awesome. This is a screenshot from within the capture software.

Default settings are a bit blown out on this camera, but by the time I got them to look more colour accurate, things were surprisingly dark. I should add, the sun is pounding through the window to the left of me, even with the curtains closed causing some glare on my main PC monitor. However, it’s also lighting the room well, so the darkness is surprising.

The camera offers a zoom feature, but it’s purely digital, so when you do not want that full FOV, you seem to be left with digital noise issues from the zoom merely cropping the image.

The camera is plug and play with just about every major camera and editing suite. However, AVerMedia provide their own too, which offers all the main controls and configurations for the camera. There’s a slider for brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and sharpness. However, only brightness and hue seem to make a positive impact. Brightness, self explanatory, and hue to adjust the colour temperature, as it seems to lack auto white ballance.

There are some settings for skin tone, smoothing, and a wide range of funky filters too. However, since I’m not hip or cool, our annoying enough to be a Twitch superstar, I have no clever ideas on what to do with them. I just want a camera for Zoom, maybe a bit of Twitch and Discord between friends, but that’s about it really. I do like that I can rotate the image easily though, it gives me a lot more options on how to mount the camera.

1080p Test

The first test went rather well, there’s a choice of refresh rates to prevent screen flicker, and clearly, that worked great. Volume levels a little lower than expected, and there’s virtually no bass captured. Lighting looks great, and at 60 FPS gameplay looks excellent.

4K Test

Increasing to 4K, the brightness levels dropped drastically, and even a powerful spotlight struggled to improve it much. However, the overall clarity was pretty decent and it looked a lot more colour accurate than the 1080p video.

As my daughter just point out though, she said “you sound different” while watching this video back, and of course, nobody thinks that’s how they sound on recordings, but she’s right, and I think it’s the lack of bass, as I have a low voice, and you can’t hear that here.