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In this detailed review of a Polycom "entry level" video communications system, you'll learn several important lessons: first, the VSX-7000 is an excellent piece of gear; second, video is still quite sensitive to high latency and packet loss conditions.
CommWeb commissioned CT Labs to evaluate Polycom's VSX-7000 video-conferencing system. Overall, they found it easy to set up and configure both endpoints in the simulated hop. It took merely 1.5 hours to get video calls working between both units.
CT Labs also found the VSX-7000 solution to be feature rich, especially given this product's billing as entry-level. The Polycom documentation for this product is very informative on all aspects of the product's setup, configuration and use; the Administrator's Guide even includes a wealth of troubleshooting information, something that's often lacking. During the manual features exercise, the CT Labs testers found that all features tested were helpful, easy to use, and free of defects. The user interface was simple, well-organized, and reasonably easy to learn and use.
During the final portion of their test, the subjective video and speech quality evaluation, CT Labs found the Polycom VSX-7000 handling of conferencing audio to be better than expected, even when the participants spoke softly or were in the presence of fairly loud background noise. This is not altogether unexpected given Polycom's longtime experience with audio conferencing systems.
The video picture and audio were found to be good under normal network conditions, but the video picture suffered more than the audio portion as the latency and packet loss conditions were increased on the simulated WAN network.
CT Labs did find that while the relatively motion-free areas of the picture were still good, any areas where the participants were in motion would experience greater distortion with worse network conditions. The CT Labs testers felt that the VSX-7000 would work very well under most of their simulated WAN conditions.
There is a point, as discovered in this test, where WAN impairments interfere enough with the call quality as to make it an unproductive activity.
Overall, the CT Labs testers felt that the Polycom VSX-7000 system was a very high-quality product with an excellent range of features. Unless the network conditions were extremely degraded, the audio and video presentation from this product...