Barco has unveiled the latest product in its ClickShare range, a step up from its previous releases. Stephen Dawson takes a look at the device to see how it stacks up.

Barco ClickShare has clearly been a very successful product for the company. I’ve reviewed two of its models over the years in these pages, but the latest product in the lineup (variations of the old ones remain current) adds a major new feature: a camera, microphones and loudspeakers. So, it not only works as a presentation system but the central unit for video conferencing.

What it is

The previous ClickShare models consisted of a smallish central unit and two quite small Buttons (I’m capitalising the B when referring to the actual devices). You would plug the central unit into a TV or display and the Buttons into two computers. Press the large, literal button on one of the Buttons and the computer into which it is plugged has its display, or a selected window, shown on the TV. Press the button on the other Button and the display for the first Button shrinks down to half-screen width (and its height reduces proportionately) and moves to the left of the TV, while the half-sized replica of the new computer’s display (or selected window) is shown to its right.

What makes the system so very good is twofold. First, the connection is established within a couple of seconds… not sitting there, wondering if it will work. That’s because the Buttons are paired with the central unit, so they don’t rely on existing network infrastructure.

Second, for users, there’s no configuration at all required. Zero. A guest can be invited into the conference room to make a presentation from their computer. A Button is plugged in. If it’s a Windows computer, a compact app on the Button’s internal memory is probably run automatically. After a few seconds, all they have to do is press the button and the new computer will be displayed.

Of course, the previous models also supported video calls. You’d plug in your favourite video hardware via USB, and then just use Zoom, Teams or whatever on your computer. And that’s where the new Barco ClickShare Bar Pro comes in. It operates pretty much the same as the models described above, but the central unit is also what some other brands might call a video bar. It has a 4K camera built into the centre, decent loudspeakers to either side and a microphone array to capture the voices in the room for those making conference calls.

What you get

The Bar is 64mm wide and quite stylish. It comes with a stand that can be flipped to operate in either desktop or wall-mount mode. Either way, the Bar can swing by quite a few degrees vertically to help sound projection and to aim the camera.

On the back is the all-important Kensington lock. On the right-hand end are soft power switches and volume controls, along with a USB-C socket and a recessed system reset button. In a cut-in section at the back, for which there’s a tidy cover, there are several connections: power, HDMI out (to your TV), USB-C (for an additional display), another USB-C and a USB-A (USB 2.0).

There are a couple of unusually thoughtful design choices. The lens cap is secured – fairly lightly – magnetically. When you take it off, there’s a marked area on top of the unit to place it, again held magnetically. That may reduce its chances of getting lost.

The other is a small thing: the three buttons on the right-hand side for power, volume up and volume down (arranged in that order, top to bottom) have the top and bottom ones indented, while the middle one (volume up) is convex. When you’re trying to find the right button to push by touch alone, nothing I’ve ever seen comes close to the effectiveness of this.

The two provided Buttons are, if my recording of the earlier specifications was correct, even slimmer and lighter than the ones of old. They are 60mm square with a 100-ish mm USB-C cable attached for plugging into a computer. They are dominated by the big, round push button in the middle. That is surrounded by a lit ring. It shows red when the unit is sending a computer image to the Bar Pro and white when it’s connected but not sending anything (the Bar itself has a ring around the camera. This has more colours which have various meanings for operation).

There’s also a small button on each Button that invokes the ClickShare app on the connected computer.

This review is of the ClickShare Bar Pro. Also available is the ClickShare Bar Core ($5,269 incl. GST), which differs primarily in providing only one Button rather than two, allowing only one connection at a time, and losing one of the USB-C sockets.

Barco also notes that the ClickShare Bar Pro has ISO 27001 security certification. I’m not quite sure what that means, but apparently, it’s uncommon and it means you can have confidence that your information will not be easily intercepted.

One thing to note is that in this review, the firmware installed in the unit was a close-to-ready development version. The final production version wasn’t quite ready in time for the deadline. The only noticeable deficiencies were that the second screen functionality didn’t seem to work and Google Cast worked with some of my devices, but not some of the others.

Setting up

The beauty of the system is that there is very little setup involved. You set up the Bar Pro underneath a large display or TV and plug it into its HDMI input. The system supports HDMI CEC, so if a Button is plugged into a computer and its button is pressed, the Bar will wake the TV automatically. Nice.

Remember, the Buttons are communicating wirelessly directly with the Bar Pro, not relying on your network. I’m not sure if they come pre-paired out of the box, but pairing simply involves plugging them into the side USB-C socket. After a few seconds, the display shows that they are paired and their firmware updated if necessary.

The Bar Pro itself can be connected to your network via Ethernet. There are two reasons for doing this. The first is management. There is a built-in web page for configuration – it’s called the ‘ClickShare Configurator’, which looks like it ought to have an exclamation mark at the end. With this, you can change things like the screen resolution (up to UHD and down to 720 by 480 pixels), passwords, security level and such as well as update the firmware. I updated the firmware while I had the unit and it went smoothly.

You can also save and load configuration files, which could be a rather useful feature when rolling several systems out at the enterprise level.

You can also change the wallpaper that is displayed when no computers are connected but note that the maximum dimensions of the picture are 4K: 4096 by 2160 pixels. And the maximum file size is 1mb. Great for displaying your company logo or whatever.

The Bar Pro has a built-in WiFi access point so that you can connect to it without it being plugged into your network, but the controlling computer is then disconnected from the Internet. So, it’s best plugged into an existing network.

And if you do that, then you can register the unit with the Barco management portal (at no extra cost). This allows remote access and control, firmware updates and extends the standard one-year warranty to a five-year smart care warranty. There are even digital signage interfaces (again, at no extra cost) for some of the major vendors so if you have a contract with one of those, you can use it on your Barco.

The basic computer control software is in about 60mb of storage on each Button. Both Windows and Macs are provided for. But you can download an extended app that provides greater features. One main one (for Windows only) is to allow the use of extended displays, so you can have your stuff on your computer while showing a separate display via the ClickShare system. That worked well but note that there’s a latency of the better part of a second between what you do on your computer and what you see on the big screen. It works, but you just need to work slowly and steadily when you’re doing things like dragging windows.

Why isn’t the extended app on the Button? The additional features typically need administrator privileges, so may require some setup. The basic app is fine for most users.

In use

Essentially, using the ClickShare Bar Pro for presentations was exactly as described above with the other models. It worked fast and extremely reliably. It turns out that with the extended app, you don’t even need the Button on an ongoing basis. But in practice, I feel that there’s an added sense of security and convenience with the simple act of pressing the button to connect and pressing it again to disconnect.

I used the Buttons with a fairly recent ASUS Windows 11 notebook, and my, what, seven-year-old Windows 10 desktop. And I really don’t know what to add. I’d press the button on a Button and a second later the stuff would appear on my big LG OLED TV.

Connecting to my Mac Mini was a bit trickier, and my experience may not be reflective of others. This was the same computer – as was my Windows 10 desktop – which I’d used for the previous review, so it had an old copy of the ClickShare app on it. Also, while I like to think I’m pretty expert with Windows, I usually just manage to fumble my way through things with Macs.

I plugged a Button into the Mac, found it in Finder and ran the ClickShare package and copied that to the Applications folder, then ran it. That placed an icon on the computer’s Dock, but clicking on it didn’t seem to do anything. I tried pressing the Button and nothing happened. The colour ring just remained white.

I went and did other things and when I returned to it half an hour later, macOS was asking for permission to authorise screen recording for the ClickShare app. I enabled that. Then I pulled the Button and reinserted it. After the light had stabilised as a white ring, indicating a connection, I pressed the Button, and voilà, the Mac screen appeared on my TV.

The app was running and hiding in a little bar at the bottom right of the computer screen. Hovering exposed it and checking its menu gave the option of running the newer app that sits on the screen like a conventional app. I did that and it all worked pretty much like the Windows one, except that for some reason the ClickShare app launcher used Terminal (which is the Mac equivalent of the MSDOS box in Windows) to start it. Quitting Terminal also terminated the ClickShare app.

I mention all this just to suggest that if your office has outsiders visiting to give presentations and some of them use Macs, it would be smart to familiarise yourself with setting up beforehand so you can guide them through it to avoid frustration.

Once it was set up, though, it was, as it is with Windows, rock solid.

There are also apps for iOS and Android (both have fairly low star ratings, although I don’t understand why). They simply show the button. You tap it and it connects. You then home back to your main screen They connected rapidly for me. The display was portrait or landscape as appropriate.

When I had my Android phone showing portrait and my Windows computer both sending at the same time, the device recognised the fact, pushed the Android display to the edge of the screen and increased the width of the Windows display to use the rest of the space.

With iOS – I used an iPad – you can eschew the app and just use the AirPlay feature to send the screen to the Bar Pro. This worked perfectly as well. The same is supposed to work with Chromecast as well, but I couldn’t get my Google Pixel 6 Pro to do it, even though the ClickShare app worked brilliantly on it. Of course, in either case, you will need to have the Bar Pro connected to your network.

But how about the new additions: the camera, microphone and soundbar abilities? Once again, they just worked as they ought to. The sound playback was quite decent and certainly more than adequate for basic video presentations and conference calls.

My voice also sounded quite good when I recorded the output from the unit and played it back. I was about 2.5m away from the system in the middle of the room. The microphones did a good job of pulling coherent sound out of a little background noise and reducing the reverb that would normally result from such a distance.

The camera was sharp and had a fair bit of intelligence built in. You can set it (using the Configurator!) to capture groups as a whole, follow whoever is speaking or provide a grid of individual faces in their own windows. These features all seemed to work quite well, albeit with a slight delay as it worked things out.

Of course. All the actual communications are via the connected computer, so it will work with your video comms package of choice.

Conclusion

There are many an organisational conference room that would benefit from the installation of the ClickShare Bar Pro. The ease of use for presentations, especially for visitors, is first class, and the video conferencing facility is quite effective.