Lenovo's $50 webcam, down from $70, is a nice, cheap upgrade to the built-in webcams on the vast majority of laptops

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• Webcams are in short supply, as they've suddenly become popular — and often necessary — accessories since many workers have been asked to conduct business from home. 
• Lenovo is selling its 500 FHD Webcam for a $20 discount, bringing its price down from $70 to $50.
• It streams video up to 1080p resolution and comes with a built-in privacy shutter. It's an ideal option to stream better-looking video than the built-in webcam on the vast majority of laptops. 

I just searched for "webcams" on Amazon, and the results were pretty dire — I was faced with a bunch of unrecognizable, no-name webcams that might be fine, but don't incite a tremendous amount of trust. 

Indeed, webcams — good webcams — are hard to come by these days. It's widely reported that webcams are in short supply during the pandemic. And, it's not surprising. Webcams weren't the hottest of product categories just a few months ago, before the Covid-19 outbreak forced people to conduct business from home, so companies had little reason to manufacture them in massive quantities.

So, when I saw Lenovo's neat little $20 discount on its 500 FHD Webcam, bringing its price down from $70 to $50, I thought I'd share.

For $50, you can have  a pretty nifty, uncomplicated plug-n-play webcam with 1080p resolution, so it'll take full advantage of most video calling services that top out at 1080p video streaming. It plugs into a computer's standard USB-A port, and the webcam itself has a USB-C port. Yes, the cable is included. 

The Lenovo 500 FHD Webcam has a wide 75-degree lens, which is pretty standard among webcams, as well as a privacy shutter to block the lens when you're not using it, which is less standard and a great additional feature.

For Windows 10 users, the Lenovo FHD 500 Webcam supports Windows Hello facial recognition for unlocking your computer. It doesn't specify whether it'll work with macOS on Mac computers. I've reached out to Lenovo asking whether it'll work with macOS devices, and I'll update this post when they reply.