Editors' Rating
| Ease of use |  |
7.5 |
| Installation & setup | |
7.5 |
| Audio quality | |
8.0 |
| Image Quality | |
8.0 |
| Features |  |
7.0 |
Published: 04 Apr 2008
Setup and operation
The hardware is impressively straightforward to set up. Cables and ports are neatly colour-coded, and you're supplied with a clear diagram showing what goes where. We had both ends of a LifeSize Express system up and running and communicating over our company LAN less than an hour after unpacking the boxes. With the maximum 1.5Mbps bandwidth available, video and audio quality was very good.
LifeSize Express in action, in ZDNet's Dialogue Box video show.
Of course, you're not going to spend £7,000 to videoconference within the same building, and it takes a little more effort to configure the system to work with remote sites beyond your firewall. If you use static NAT (Network Address Translation) to map a public IP address to LifeSize Express's private IP address, the system needs to be configured to work with your static NAT server. Some management functions are not available if you access LifeSize Express via a (Flash 8-enabled) browser from outside a firewall with static NAT enabled.
To allow LifeSize Express to talk to other systems through a firewall, you'll need to open up TCP port 1720 for H.323 call setup and UDP port 5060 for SIP call setup. The administrator guide is pretty clear, and any competent IT manager should have no problem setting up communications links.
LifeSize Express is a standards-based videoconferencing system, unlike most of the low-end solutions. Specifically, the standards supported are: H.323 and SIP (communications); H263, H.264 and H.239 (video); G.711, G.722, G.722.1C, G.728, G729, MPEG-4 AAC (audio). H.264 compression is what shoehorns HD video into 1.5Mbps bandwidth, while H.239 allows a second video stream — for example from an attached PC running a presentation — to be added to the mix.
In use, LifeSize Express does its job very well. Although the video is not artefact-free, it looked very good on the 24in. HD monitors (from ASUS and Samsung) we used in our tests. The overall audio-visual experience is certainly streets ahead of any low-end webcam solution we've seen (although these are getting better).
Once firewall issues are sorted, LifeSize Express's default settings work pretty well, while the codec automatically adjusts video frame rate and quality to match the available bandwidth (dropping to DVD quality — 848 x 480 pixels — at 512Kbps, for example). You may have to manually adjust the camera's white balance to suit your location, but that's about it.
Conclusion
Although £3,499 (plus the cost of an HD monitor) per location is not exactly cheap, LifeSize Express is a great deal more affordable than the high-end telepresence systems touted by the likes of Cisco and HP. If you want more functionality than the single-screen, point-point Express product, LifeSize offers a range of solutions that progressively add more participants, screens and cameras: Team MP (£5,299), Room (£7,499) and Conference (£22,999). We're impressed, although we'll be keeping an eye on the improving low end of the videoconferencing market, exemplified by products such as ooVoo and SightSpeed.
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