This Super-Small Webcam Is Low-Key Awesome. But Do You Actually Need It?

Do you need a webcam for your laptop when you travel? Opal thinks you do.

Published December 14, 2023

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Updated December 14, 2023

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The Opal Tadpole is an external webcam that faces an upstream battle (do tadpoles swim upstream?). It comes a few years after the great webcam shortage during the pandemic when you couldn’t find a webcam online or, if you did, its price was exorbitantly inflated. Thankfully, it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) to buy a webcam nowadays.

Opal Tadpole
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Also, laptop manufacturers have caught up with the times. Seemingly learning from webcam demand, most laptops that have been released in the past two-ish years have significantly improved webcams — most are 1080p or higher.

Lastly, Opal’s Tadpole is a webcam with a unique purpose: it’s specifically designed for laptops. It’s the smallest and most travel-friendly webcam that I’ve tested, but its USB-C cable is too short to use with most desktop or monitor setups (assuming you want to place it on top of your display, of course).

Basically, the Opal Tadpole is an external webcam that limits itself to people with older laptops that have cruddy webcams or people with newer laptops who want an even better webcam. And at $175, it’s not that cheap of an upgrade.

Still, despite all these currents (a fast-flowing water reference) fighting against the Tadpole, I can’t help but kind of love this little device. It’s a fantastic, albeit simple, webcam.

Opal Tadpole: What We Think

The Opal Tadpole is an adorable little webcam that’s easy to use, works well and, in my opinion, is quite stylish. It’s a tough sell, however, being that it’s really only meant for standalone laptops … its integrated cable simply isn’t long enough to allow it to work with a desktop or monitor setup. If you’re somebody who travels with a laptop — especially a laptop from a few years ago — and is looking for a quick way to improve how you look and sound on video calls, the Tadpole is a surefire (albeit somewhat pricey) solution.

Opal Tadpole

$175.00 at opalcamera.com

Pros

Works really well and is really simple to use
Very small and extremely portable
Built-in directional mic sounds pretty good

Cons

1080p image quality is not that much better than newest laptops
The cable is too short for the webcam to work in a desktop or monitor setup
It's not exactly cheap

It’s a plug-and-play webcam … that works with everything

Probably the most refreshing about the Opal Tadpole is, it just works. There’s no serious setup process or app you need to install to get the Opal working. You simply plug it into your laptop, click the permission notification (allowing your computer to trust the accessory), and you’re in business. It’s truly plug and play.

If you have a Mac, there is a companion app — Opal Composer — that you can download to give you more manual controls over things like bokeh, lighting, colors and zoom (to name a few). I tried it just to see what it’s like … and it’s simple and intuitive, but not something that most people will feel the need to go back to frequently.

It’s a small webcam with a big sensor

Photo (above): The M3 MacBook Pro’s 1080p webcam (left) vs the Opal Tadpole’s 1080p webcam (right). Both are quite good, but different.

The Tadpole is not a 4K webcam. Or rather, it doesn’t shoot 4K. It has a 48-megapixel sensor — which is a big sensor that’s actually the same one (Sony IMX582) found in some fairly recent Samsung and OnePlus smartphones — and outputs a 1080p (or HD) picture. According to Opal, the Tadpole can actually capture 4K video but it downscales to 1080p as that is “the current maximum of all video conferencing applications.”

I own an M2 MacBook Air and am testing the most-recent M3 MacBook Pro — both also have 1080p webcams. And, in my opinion, the Tadpole delivers a more realistic picture with more contrast and a bright background that doesn’t blow your face out quite as easily. However, the quality shift not as night-and-day as you might think — many new laptops have very good webcams — and you might even prefer the brighter look of your MacBook’s webcam.

The built-in mic is actually quite good

The Tadpole isn’t an “all-in-one” webcam. There’s no built-in speaker or glow light — there’s no space for it — but it does have a built-in microphone that’s pretty good. It’s a front-facing directional microphone that Opal has integrated with “VisiMic” technology; it basically helps the mic only pick up sounds from right in front of the camera, and block most everything else out.

In my testing I found that the mic isolated these noises pretty well; I work from home so most of the background noise comes from the TV. However, colleagues told me that I still sounded better when just using my new MacBook Pro … but it has “studio-quality mics” and I wouldn’t expect a tiny webcam to compete with that.

It’s an adorable and well-built gadget.

a pair of glasses on a table — The Tadpole comes with a little silicone lens cover.

Despite its small size, the Tadpole feels anything but cheap. It’s made mostly of aluminum and glass, with a silicone clip that firmly grips the back of your laptop and a braided USB-C cable. After reading David Pierce’s review on The Verge, I can’t help but think it looks a little like an iPad Shuffle too. It’s a premium build.

The other neat thing is that the USB-C connector that plugs into your laptop has a capacitive touch sensor; by tapping it, you can mute and unmute your microphone (a red light turns on/off to let you know when you’re muted or not). It’s easy to use and works well, although it’s exactly software capability varies video conferencing apps. When in Google Meet, for example, I could mute myself in the call by touching the webcam, but they wouldn’t recognize each other. That’s a little annoying.

Overall, however, the construction is impressive — and hey if you’ve made it this far, the Tadpole just might be for you.