Filming my miniature painting with the BenQ ideaCam S1 Pro
Okay, let’s get something straight. As you’ve probably noticed so far, the quality of the BenQ ideaCam footage isn’t going to win awards for quality. I’ve been working with professional camera equipment for years, and my expectations for what makes good visual content is very high.
As such, I did feel a tad disappointed in the quality of the footage with the BenQ ideaCam when it came to filming my miniature painting process. I mounted the camera above my painting hobby desk, as you can see in the images.
The camera is easy to mount anywhere you want using a standard tripod screw attachment.
Optimization efforts failed to offer better results
Even with some of the best task and studio lighting you can buy for hobby work, the BenQ ideaCam struggled to maintain good exposure that didn’t blow out the highlights. When I lowered the exposure settings for the camera to avoid over-saturating the bright surfaces in my image, I lost a lot information into the shadows.
The colors here are the best you’ll get with this camera. It’s not bad, but won’t win any production awards. Though, in the BenQ ideaCam’s defense, this is probably on-par with most USB-connected webcams.
Suffice it to say, the BenQ ideaCam has a fairly limited dynamic range which makes it hard to use for filming scenes that have a very bright and dark areas in the same field of view.

While I didn’t expect much from the auto white balance (AWB) and color accuracy of the camera, this is also an area that didn’t meet my threshold for “good enough” for filming miniature painting.
(This aspect of the review will continue to be updated as I collect more footage with the camera)
In general, I think the BenQ ideaCam is best suited for those teleconferencing needs where you need to switch from portrait (speaking head) type streaming and documenting simple things, like a sketch on paper or notes that are hand-written on a document of some sort.
To summarize, when it comes to creating content for public consumption, the BenQ ideaCam falls short for those of us who are looking for an all-in-one camera system.
I would recommend instead that anyone looking to create hobby content, e.g., filming their art process, to look elsewhere. Yes, you’ll likely need a higher budget. But, when it comes to value, this is not an area where the BenQ ideaCam S1 Pro excels.