Easy communication is vital to keep businesses running smoothly. But, despite 41% of employees in the UK reporting working from home in a week between January and Mark 2025, and most meetings between businesses now held over the internet, few offices are set up to hold video calls effectively. At best, this can lead to frustrating internal meetings that slow productivity, but at the worst, it can make your organisation look amateurish in front of clients and partners.

The solution? Video conferencing systems.

We’re The Chris Lewis Group, a company based in Oxford that specialises in designing and installing smart office systems to help businesses maximise productivity. We’ve installed state-of-the-art video conferencing solutions for government agencies, non-profit organisations and private companies throughout the UK.

In this article, we explain what video conferencing solutions are, how to choose the right equipment, and how you can ensure your meetings are as clear and productive as possible.

What Is a Video Conferencing Solution?

A video conferencing solution is a system that lets you hold real-time, face-to-face meetings with people in different places. Single employees at home? Remote teams? Decision makers at another business? With a professionally installed video conferencing system, you can hold meetings that are just as seamless as having everyone in the same room.

This isn’t just Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, though. A video conferencing solution is designed to allow multiple people in an office to attend a meeting and use the same system, rather than each using their own device.

There will be a camera and microphones set up to capture everyone in the room, along with a display (or displays) and speakers so that remote attendees can be seen and heard. This is perfect for large virtual meetings or conference calls where there will be a lot of people attending from the same office.

What Video Conferencing Equipment Do I Need?

While some systems may have extra pieces, four central components will always be present:

Display(s)
Speakers
Camera(s)
Microphones

Screen

The most obvious part of your system is the screen. The size, shape and lighting of your room will have a huge impact on your choice.

Everyone needs to be able to see a screen without craning their necks. In a smaller room, this isn’t a major problem, and you will have a choice between an LCD or OLED display, or a projector and screen. Once your room is big enough to demand a screen that’s over 100” in size, however, a projector is your only option.

External light levels also need to be considered. If your meeting room has south-facing windows and you don’t want to install blackout curtains or blinds, you can deal with a lot of glare. With a standard projector, this can make it difficult to see the image clearly, so you may need to upgrade to a more powerful projector. Ultra Short Throw Projectors and Laser Projectors will both give you a much brighter image, so you can see clearly, even in adverse lighting conditions.

Finally, you’ll need to think about the shape of your room. If the space you want to turn into a video conference room is particularly wide, a single screen could be a literal pain in the neck for people sitting at the edges. In this situation, you’re probably better off choosing two smaller screens instead.

Speakers

For video conferencing, speakers are arguably even more important than your display or camera. After all, a crisp, clear image is nice to have, but if you’re having to lipread in every meeting, you’ve probably allocated your budget wrong.

The most important thing to consider is placement, especially in relation to your microphones. Even with echo cancellation technology, placing microphones and speakers too close together could lead to feedback and audio loops.

Beyond this, think about the size and purpose of your room when deciding on your speakers. For larger rooms or rooms with multiple seating areas, you may need several speakers to fill the space so everyone can hear clearly.

Different speaker types are available, and will be more or less appropriate depending on your space:

Pendant Speakers: These are typically suspended from the ceiling and offer even sound distribution in a room, while maximising floor space.
Ceiling Speakers: Similar to pendant speakers, but mounted directly to, or in, the ceiling.
Wall-mounted Speakers: Good for smaller rooms or where ceiling mounting isn’t practical.
Soundbars: These typically sit below your display. A good, budget-friendly option for a smaller space, but may not be enough in a larger room.
Beamforming Speakers: These advanced speakers can focus sound directly towards listeners, reducing noise interference.

Cameras

Your choice of camera is a hugely important factor when it comes to building your video conferencing system.

A low-resolution camera can make it hard for remote attendees to tell who is talking, and can make your organisation look unprofessional. A resolution of 1080p is a must, but at the same time, bigger is not always better. If your meeting room only holds 6 people, sat quite close to the screen, a 4K camera is probably overkill, and you would be better off with a built-in conferencing camera.

Not all video conferencing platforms support 4K video, either. At time of writing (September 2024), Zoom, Teams and Meets all cap out at 1080p and 30fps. So, unless you work with an enterprise-level video conferencing platform, a 4K camera is simply an expensive 1080p camera.

Even with a platform that can handle 4K, your bandwidth (or the remote viewer’s) may be too low to handle the video. The results are usually buffering, unstable connections, compression or pixelation, defeating the point of an Ultra High Definition camera in the first place. Finally, if you record your meetings, the 4K video files will also take up more space on your hard drive or server.

Camera positioning is also important. By placing a camera high up, you can capture more people in the shot, but too high, and you won’t capture everyone’s faces properly (and you’ll probably make lots of men self-conscious about their thinning hair, too!). By putting the camera low down, you’ll get a clearer view of faces, but people in front might block those behind them.

If there are so many people in the room that the person on the other end can’t easily tell who’s talking, you may want a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) camera with presenter tracking. Using AI and machine learning, these cameras can determine who is speaking, and adjust to focus and zoom in on them.

A professional video conferencing installer will have the expertise to help you pick the perfect camera (or cameras) for your space, platform and budget.

Microphones

Finally, microphones need to be placed strategically to ensure that everyone in the room can be heard clearly by those on the other end of the call. Ceiling-mounted microphones can help save desk space, but they may not capture audio quite as well as desk-mounted microphones positioned closer to participants’ mouths.

If you’re struggling with background noise from adjoining rooms disrupting your audio (a particular problem for spaces with drop ceilings), you can install noise cancelling systems that isolate background noise and cut it out. This could be someone eating crisps in the conference room, or another staff member making coffee in the kitchenette next door.

There is also sound masking technology, which is used to cancel noise bleeding out from the meeting room. This is especially useful in video conferencing for businesses that handle sensitive information.

Finally, for larger spaces and conferencing venues, there is voice lift technology. When someone is presenting, the speakers around them will turn off, and the microphones nearby will turn on. The person speaking can then talk normally, and their voice will be projected through the other speakers in the room. This allows the presenter to talk naturally and be heard clearly by the whole room (and remote viewers), without needing to hold a microphone or deal with the hassle of passing it from person to person.

How Much Does a Video Conferencing System Cost?

Like with most bespoke systems – it depends. While we can estimate the cost of a display, speakers, cameras, and microphones are impossible to ballpark. There is a huge amount of variety available, and the requirements of the project will make a big difference to what you need.

For smaller projects, a single speakerphone and basic conferencing camera that costs £150 could be enough. At the other end of the scale, a large boardroom could take dozens of speakers and microphones, and two or three PTZ cameras at £6000 each.

Screens

We’ve broken down the displays available into five groups:

- LCD/OLED Smart TV – the same sort of screen you might have in your home.
- Commercial Displays – an LCD/OLED screen that is designed to handle continual use, and with extra features for commercial applications.
- Interactive Displays (Touch) – Similar to a commercial display, but with touchscreen capabilities.
- Business Projectors – Video projectors designed for commercial use. In this article, we’re referring to projectors for small to medium rooms.
- Large Room Laser Projectors – Designed for larger spaces like conference centres, these are much brighter than business projectors, with better resolutions and longer lifespans as well. They often come with specialised lenses for wider throw and larger projected images.

LCD/OLED Smart TV

£750 to £3000. In general, as screen resolution and size increase, price will increase.

Commercial Displays

£1000 to £5000 – price increases with screen resolution, size and extra features.

Interactive Displays (Touch)

£2000 to £8000 – price increasing with screen resolution, size and extra features.

Business Projectors

£1000 to £3000 – price increases with brightness, resolution, features, and lenses (which affect the throw of the beam).

Large Room Laser Projector With Specialist Lens

£10,000 to £50,000 – as with business projectors, the price will increase with the capabilities of the laser projector.

Packages

We’ve split up packages into five “tiers”:

- Huddle rooms – Small spaces for a maximum of four people.
- Small meeting rooms – holding around 6-10 people.
- Medium meeting rooms – 10-15 people
- Large meeting rooms – 12-20 people
- Extra large spaces/boardrooms – 20+ people

Huddle Rooms

From £1250 – A space this small shouldn’t need any speakers other than those built into the screen, and a basic conferencing camera will easily capture all the participants.

Small Meeting Rooms

From £2500 – A screen, a camera, and a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) system should be plenty for a basic system in this space. If you would prefer a more bespoke or sophisticated system, the price will be higher.

Medium Meeting Rooms

From £4000 – All the features above, plus a Teams-based meeting system. This is also the point at which your room shape may have an impact on the number and positioning of your cameras, screens, speakers and microphones.

Large Meeting Rooms

From £8000 – At this point, you’ll need to add in speakers, microphones and a PTZ camera to ensure everyone can participate fully. You will probably need to switch from LCD/OLED displays, too, as the upper boundary for them is 100”, which may not be large enough for everyone to see (depending on room dimensions).

Extra Large Spaces/Boardrooms

From £12000 – In a space this size, the display will likely need to be over 100” in size, so you will need to switch to a projector and screen. This price also includes voice lift conferencing technology, so anyone presenting can be heard in the space, as well as over the call.

Integrating Your Video Conferencing Systems

Video conferencing solutions don’t have to be standalone technologies. They can be integrated with other smart office systems to streamline booking and optimise room usage.

By integrating your video conferencing technology with meeting room booking systems you can automate availability checks, set up reminders and organise easy-join meeting links.

With Building Management System (BMS) integration, rooms can be automatically locked and unlocked based on meeting schedules, and lighting and temperature can be optimised automatically. On top of this, room occupancy sensors can save money by shutting off these systems if the meeting doesn’t happen.

Conclusion

Hybrid working and online meetings are here to stay, and video conferencing solutions are now an essential part of modern business operations.

At Chris Lewis, we have created state-of-the-art video conferencing solutions for sites ranging from the UK Atomic Energy Agency to St Paul’s Cathedral. Our engineers can design and build a completely bespoke setup to suit your unique needs and space.

If you’d like to discuss installing or upgrading a video conferencing solution, we can help. Simply fill in the form below, and we will be in touch.

Video Conferencing Solutions: Achieving Crystal Clear Communication