Meeting room camera coverage calculator

Will the people at the near end of the table be in the shot? Enter the camera's field of view and the table, and check before you mount it.

How it works

A camera's view is a wedge that starts narrow at the lens and widens with distance. A 90° camera covers 2 ft of width for every foot of distance, so at 5 ft it sees 10 ft across. The people closest to the camera are the ones who get cut off, which is why the near seats decide where the camera goes.

The far end is the other limit: the wider the field of view, the fewer pixels land on each face at the back of the room. The calculator assumes a face about 6 in (16 cm) wide.

Field notes

• Measure to the shoulders, not the chairs. The width to cover at the near seats is the table width plus a person's shoulders on each side, roughly a foot or more beyond each table edge.
• Wide-angle lenses bend the edges. Very wide cameras (beyond about 110°) make the near-corner people look stretched and the far people look tiny. Many rooms are better served by a narrower camera mounted a little further back.
• Auto-framing uses digital zoom. When the camera crops in on whoever is talking, the pixels on their face drop accordingly. A 4K sensor gives auto-framing much more room before faces turn soft.
• Mount height matters too. Mounting just above or below the display keeps eye contact natural. Too high and everyone is looking at the tops of heads.
• Check the spec sheet's field of view type. Some cameras quote diagonal field of view, which is larger than the horizontal figure this calculator needs.

FAQ

How do I convert diagonal field of view to horizontal?

For a 16:9 image, horizontal FOV = 2 × atan(tan(diagonal ÷ 2) × 0.8716). A 100° diagonal is about 92° horizontal.

Why is the far end blurry even on a good camera?

At the back of a long room each face may only get a few dozen pixels, and the video platform compresses the stream on top of that. A narrower lens, a second camera, or a camera that frames the speaker helps.