[HN Gopher] Webcams aren't good enough
___________________________________________________________________
Webcams aren't good enough
Author : 6581
Score : 360 points
Date : 2022-06-19 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reincubate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reincubate.com)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Lighting and audio are more important than raw image quality.
|
| Getting an expensive camera to send heavily compressed 320p low
| bandwidth video doesn't really improve a whole lot.
|
| Honestly the #1 improvement most people need to work on is
| speaking clearly and loud enough. #2 would be having literally
| any light source in front of them rather than being purely
| backlit.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| Just FTR for the active speaker Zoom streams heavily compressed
| 720p that goes up to 1080p if HD is enabled. It's low bitrate
| but still makes a difference in clarity.
|
| The article agrees lighting is important but also that these
| webcams are really shitty and blow out the subject even with
| proper key lighting. I bought a C920 at the beginning of the
| pandemic and it's embarrassing how bad the exposure is unless
| I'm sitting directly in front of a window with the shades drawn
| to provide evenly distributed white light.
| oittaa wrote:
| > Lighting and audio are more important than raw image quality.
|
| Exactly! A decent USB microphone costs something like $100 and
| will improve your calls more than anything. I can tolerate if
| your image is a bit dark and blurry, but it's super hard to pay
| attention if you sound like you're calling from a two square
| metre tiled bathroom through a 1950s telephone system.
|
| The selection process doesn't have to be super complicated that
| satisfies every audiophile. Just google what streamers on
| Youtube and Twitch use and choose something that fits your
| budget. For example Blue Yeti and Audio-Technica AT2020USB are
| popular, relatively cheap, and super simple to use.
|
| And as mentioned the best thing you can do to image quality is
| just to improve your lighting.
| asojfdowgh wrote:
| So when using the barebones webcam protocol, the webcams look
| bad, when using custom software for the webcams or iphones, the
| results are much better.
|
| Why is the conclusion that the hardware is bad, not that the
| method of using the hardware is bad?
| kkfx wrote:
| Mh, I wonder what article author think for webcam use cases...
| Personally I consider them useless 99% of the time in the sense
| that there is no need for video. When a video is needed 480p is
| enough, eventual dropped frames or artifacts does not matter
| much. If we really need hi resolution it's beyond webcam,
| something about YT, TV, ... not webcams anyway. If we need to
| share _paper_ docs (LIM alike) it 's better scan them before.
| 55555 wrote:
| You can download the app "iriun webcam" and then run your iPhone
| or Android phone on the same wifi network and it will feed your
| phone camera in as webcam input. No tech setup needed, just
| download the app and you're done.
| haunter wrote:
| I use the Elgato EpocCam app with my iPhone 11. Works perfectly
| with OBS https://www.elgato.com/en/epoccam
| mjcohen wrote:
| I having been successfully using the Anker PowerConf 300 webcam.
| Using the AnkerWork software on my M1 mac, I find it has
| excellent autofocus, auto exposure, and zoom and pan
| capabilities. The cost is $130, but it is often on sale at $100.
|
| I have used it with iGlasses, but that has tended to crash after
| about an hour. So I use AnkerWork though it is less convenient.
| thewebcount wrote:
| What is going on in the video of the C920 exposure test? It's not
| clear if he's changing lighting, changing camera settings, or
| letting the driver change some internal settings, but the view
| out the window is getting less and less overexposed while his
| face remains exactly as overexposed at each step. It's like it's
| exposing different parts of the frame differently and all poorly.
| WTF?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| He is quite clear: he is changing the lights in the room.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Webcams don't have to be good because people have low
| expectations.
|
| People with high expectations use DSLRs as webcams.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Surely the adult webcam industry has solved this problem?
| alar44 wrote:
| Yeah, buy a video camera, not a $100 webcam.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| This made me laugh.
|
| > Using an iPhone as a webcam is easily the best option without
| dropping an excess of $1,000 for professional camera gear. Using
| the iPhone you already own, or a recent hand-me-down, a moderate
| investment in lighting, and Reincubate Camo, you can get
| excellent results and none of the frustration and hassle that
| accompanies standalone webcams.
|
| I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is better
| than any of the webcams reviewed, I'm spending a couple hundred
| bucks at least. Then I need to spend $50/year or so on their Camo
| software.
|
| For a couple hundred bucks I can get a used Sony Alpha, OBS is
| _free_. And arguably with effort I can make the Sony look much
| better.
|
| This is a stretch, of course. The average person isn't going to
| fuck around with OBS.
|
| Let's think of it another way. For <$100 you can have a webcam
| that works. It's better than nothing. Is an iPhone plus TFA's
| software better? Yes. Is it better proportional to the cost?
| Absolutely not. I'm not even convinced it's _twice_ as good. I
| have some colleagues who use Camo, happily, but as a viewer in a
| Zoom meeting, I don 't care. They're usually the size of a
| postage stamp on my screen. Most folks can't even upload full
| resolution streams of their cheap webcams in real-time.
|
| Camo is cool, it's great that you can use your phone as a webcam,
| I love it, but "Why $90 webcams aren't as good as a $1000+
| iPhone" would be a better title.
| wyager wrote:
| Don't use a sony A6**; they overheat. Use a fujifilm or an A7
| series.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| A7 is definitely a better pick but I use a A6000 as my webcam
| and haven't had any issues with overheating.
|
| My main annoyance with the A6000 is can't charge and film at
| the same time so I had to buy a dummy battery pack power
| adapter which works but looks janky.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The other guy said literally the opposite. Maybe you two
| fight it out, and report the outcome?
| wyager wrote:
| Easy solution; use Fujifilm. We both agree they don't
| overheat. Incidentally, I think they are also much better
| cameras for most use cases.
| can16358p wrote:
| Unless someone is living under a rock (at least anyone in the
| use-phone-as-webcam territory), they probably have an Android
| phone if they don't have an iPhone.
|
| Any decent Android phone should work too. I'm sure there are
| many apps enabling this. While they probably have worse image
| quality than iPhone, they'd definitely be much better than
| those cheapo webcams.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| OBS camera won't work in many MacOS programs nor will GoPro
| Webcam. It should be noted that the M1 MacBook Pro has a camera
| which is noticeably better than it used to be.
| vetinari wrote:
| With gopro, it depends on the model and how you connect it.
|
| I did use gopro (an older one, hero3) as a webcam, and it did
| work, to a point. Hero3 has hdmi output (not clean, but it
| dissapears after few seconds), so connecting it via hdmi
| capture dongle did work as a standard usb webcam in MacOS.
| The picture was great, the latency was under 10 frames when
| doing 60 fps capture. The problem was, that it could not
| charge and record at the same time, and it didn't give any
| signs of life when the battery was empty (other than
| signalling the charging). You could not even leave it
| powered, so it would charge when empty - it would notice only
| when you press some button, that it is empty and start
| charging. It was annoying to make sure the battery is charged
| enough when needed, so I just got an logitech webcam; the
| picture is worse, but just works, all the time, without
| babysitting.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Try using it with Discord and get back to me. GoPro Hero 9
| can charge while being used as webcam but it's not
| compatible with the apps I care about.
| vetinari wrote:
| With hero3 it is not a problem, see the very first
| sentence.
|
| It does not stream over usb. There's no app to simulate
| webcam on the host operating system. Hero3 outputs hdmi,
| you use some hdmi-to-usb dongle, which are plain old USB
| UVC class devices and every operating system out there
| with usb support knows how to handle them. So if a
| logitech or whatever webcam works, this one will work
| too.
|
| However, I see that hero9 has no hdmi out. That's the
| bummer.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The simplicity of a normal webcam also has a huge value.
|
| I hate waiting a few extra minutes at the beginning of a
| meeting while someone tries to get their complex webcam setup
| working. Some people can plan ahead and make it all work. Some
| people are always fighting with audio settings or restarting
| OBS or adjusting their webcam and so on. Wasted time for
| everyone involved.
|
| I'm not looking forward to the new era of people messing with
| their iPhone mounts to their laptops to get the camera juuust
| right as we start every meeting.
|
| Let's just use the built-in webcams and get on with our
| meetings. Or if you want to use a fancy setup, you _must_ have
| it all ready and tested before the meeting starts.
| dagmx wrote:
| For what it's worth, with the new macOS 13 and iOS 16 releases,
| you don't need Camo as it's built into the OS.
|
| Of course the rest of your points still stand. The article does
| hinge on the user having an iPhone, and the comparison isn't
| entirely fair.
|
| However I think the point of the article is to say that many
| people have devices on hand that will give better results than
| splurging on webcams which won't provide much gain
| maccard wrote:
| > I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is
| better than any of the webcams reviewed, I'm spending a couple
| hundred bucks at least. T
|
| To be fair, he reviewed an iPhone so he recommended that. I
| think the advice is really more like "use the existing high
| powered camera you have in your pocket".
| system2 wrote:
| > $50/year for Camo
|
| LOL what? Is this true?
| skybrian wrote:
| Some of the Android phones are probably pretty decent too? He
| didn't review them, though.
| [deleted]
| sfblah wrote:
| This makes me wonder whether there's some relatively simple
| configuration of cameras that can be used to give a basic 3-d
| type experience. Nothing crazy like the oculus, but maybe
| something where a computer can use head tracking so that as you
| move your head, you see a little bit around the other person's
| face so it feels a little more lifelike.
|
| I assume this would only be relevant for the primary speaker, of
| course.
| MrLeap wrote:
| A realsense camera, 2 hours worth of dev and OBS virtual cam
| and I could make a scattery POC of this :p
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| We just use webcams to say "hi!" and all that stuff, then turn
| them off, someone has a powerpoint on, and even if someone else
| left their camera on, noone is looking at them.
|
| So basically, a vga camera would be enough to recognize my face,
| smile and wave, and after that, it's audio only.
|
| Laptop mics are a different story, especially with fans on
| high,... and bluetooth headset mics.. or cabled earphones mics...
| some seem to work really great, and some people seem to be
| talking from somewhere deep inside a well or even worse, and
| there is no seeming price/audio_quality correlation.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| good audio is better than good video, I don't care if you look
| like a potato, I just need clear low-latency audio
| kcb wrote:
| Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video
| conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to
| be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not
| being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway.
|
| Anyway this is the one I've been using.
| https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I
| like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the
| c920.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I kind of agree. We're years away from when most people's
| videoconferencing quality is close to C920 quality. Audio is
| much more important. The C920's is pretty crap. You can easily
| buy better mics, but unfortunately most people just don't care
| about the quality of their own output.
|
| I think part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to
| _know_ your audio /video sounds/looks crap to other people. For
| most users they won't have a clue until someone says "I can't
| hear you" lots of times.
|
| Zoom doesn't even have a way to test your connection.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| > "In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like
| 360p low bitrate"
|
| But a low-bitrate video that uses better-quality source pixels
| can still look much better than if used bad pixels as input.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| specially if the "bad" pixels are noise that consume most of
| the bitrate without carrying information.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| yeah well pornhub visitors would beg to differ.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer
| a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not
| having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional
| stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look
| for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would
| also be a welcome feature.
|
| That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good
| quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say,
| really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement
| for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on
| everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better
| quality than that.
|
| (Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of
| things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow
| motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably
| make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine
| where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more
| easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I
| realize I'm the outlier here.)
| myself248 wrote:
| > It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the
| image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome
| feature.
|
| OBS with virtual camera. Add the camera as a source, scale
| and crop to your heart's content, click 'start virtual
| camera', then launch your videoconferencing software and
| choose the virtual camera.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Thanks! I already glanced at my options and this one seemed
| like overkill, but yeah it does sound like the go-to
| solution that everyone uses. Will be installing this some
| time soon, thanks for confirming this is the way to go :)
| (Also to the sibling comment)
| jpindar wrote:
| You could use OBS studio to crop the image. It takes your
| webcam as an input and creates a virtual cam that works with
| every conferencing software I've tried. (It can also use your
| phone camera with the aid of the DroidCam OBS app.)
| retrac wrote:
| > good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing
|
| As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to
| video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand
| them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not
| presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the
| compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially
| garbled, too.
| lucb1e wrote:
| You probably know of this already, but in some software you
| can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise
| for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know
| this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube
| auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing
| as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the
| input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not sure,
| but if you're having trouble understanding, getting 80% as
| text plus your own hearing and lip reading might be a big
| aid.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too
| unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native
| US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my
| previous company we joked about how completely unusable
| it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it
| also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases
| that certainly weren't being said.
| kyriakos wrote:
| That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people
| in our team are not native English speakers and it does a
| really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the
| meeting is pure comedy.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Microsoft Teams also does this.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Zoom has this also.
| extra88 wrote:
| As others have mentioned, Microsoft Teams also has an auto-
| generated Live Captions feature. It supports creating live
| captions for a number of spoken languages [0].
|
| Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription
| [1].
|
| While such features can be helpful, using them is rather
| different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a
| conversation.
|
| [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-
| captions...
|
| [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
| us/articles/207279736-Managing...
| Casteil wrote:
| Yep.. I don't want a camera so good that my colleagues can see
| a wild nose hair or any other normal human imperfections via
| web conferencing, lol
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I don't know how much time you spend on zoom calls but if both
| sides have genuinely good connections and you have a good
| camera and lighting, you can get fairly high def video across.
| And it makes a big difference, especially if you're 1-1 and
| want to make a proper connection and read their expression.
| michaelt wrote:
| In a small call with 2-4 participants, sure.
|
| But a work meeting with 6 people and a presentation? Every
| participant's video will be shrunk to the size of a postage
| stamp.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Depends on so many factors. How large is the screen? Is use
| of multiple screens enabled in zoom? Is speaker mode
| enabled?
| daveoc64 wrote:
| I don't know how up to date this is, but there are
| limitations in both Zoom and Microsoft Teams in regards to
| video quality:
|
| https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207347086-Using-
| Gr...
|
| You also need to have a higher plan to get 1080p video in
| some cases.
|
| For the Zoom Pro account, you even have to contact Zoom
| Support to get them to enable 720p!
| throwyawayyyy wrote:
| +1 to that. I don't want to be in ultra HD in meetings. I mean,
| I also don't want to look like a character from a 90s CD-ROM
| game -- but that's a matter of bandwidth, not the camera.
|
| In a way, 720p or below is a non-vain version of applying a
| filter, smoothing imperfections away.
| geysersam wrote:
| Don't think this is actually true. We stream high definition
| video regularly nowadays. It's not a question of resolution,
| but of other qualities of the recording, the way differences
| in lighting is handled etc. Those imperfections are not
| smoothed away by compression.
| QuantumSeed wrote:
| To your point, I've seen some modern webcams accentuate
| extremely minor facial blemishes to the point where
| observers actually notice it and call it out, concerned
| that the person is sick or has had some sort shaving
| incident. I would think compression would make that even
| worse.
| ectopod wrote:
| Mine does this. It makes me look drunk. People who met me
| in real life after lockdown were surprised I looked
| normal. I keep meaning to find some software that will
| turn the red down.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I care a lot less about resolution, but more about the actual
| image quality. Noise, color/white balance, detail, etc.
| wyager wrote:
| If you tweak some zoom settings you can get a slightly-less-
| shitty bitrate, and people constantly comment on the quality of
| my MILC-based setup (APS-C camera with a cheapo chinese prime
| f/1.2 lens). This is vs the $200-ish logitech external webcam
| that is standard issue at my company.
| layer8 wrote:
| > In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like
| 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp
| detail on calls anyway.
|
| Good color is kind of important though and usually not affected
| by bandwidth.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| At the end of the day, you'll mostly end up as a glorified
| thumbnail in a small corner of a, let's be realistic, 1080p
| screen, next to a bunch of other people. No one in the call
| gains anything by watching each other, it doesn't matter. For
| this case, just get a good microphone (even a 30EUR Behringer
| sounds much better than whatever it is most people use).
| standardUser wrote:
| I had a Logitech C920 that died a couple years ago and when I
| went to find a better replacement I ended up buying a... Logitech
| C920. I couldn't find anything that seemed significantly better
| that wasn't a lot more money. I regret the purchase, but I'm glad
| I didn't just spend 3 times as much on a still-not-that-great
| webcam. I was thinking of finding a second-hand digital camera on
| eBay, but maybe instead I'll see if a friend has an old iPhone.
|
| Though you'd think with the WFH revolution there would be at
| least one company out there making a high-quality purpose-built
| webcam.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Get a cheap used android phone and use the back camera as a
| webcam. Many times better than any webcam that doesn't cost a
| fortune.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Right, but then you can't share your screen, and you can't
| see the call participants because the android screen is
| facing away from you.
| vhanda wrote:
| I think they meant to buy an extra android phone and use
| that as a webcam.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah it's wild how much of a vacuum exists in this market and
| how bad it is.
|
| I have the same webcam I also bought the lg meetup for a larger
| room and it sucks - it especially sucks considering the price.
|
| The Opal is a weak attempt to improve this, but includes a mic
| I don't want (lots of decent separate mics exist). The
| mirrorless setup looks great, but with latency, capture cards,
| over heating, external battery packs, required camera arms etc.
| just a huge pain.
|
| I wish apple would just make a good one again since nobody else
| seems capable of it.
| yborg wrote:
| Logitech dominates the market, and it dominates it by marketing
| spend, not on making a better product, since they know that the
| average consumer will never know the difference.
|
| I bought a C920 on the basis of many shilled reviews, and I
| kneel to the power of their marketing department every time I
| turn that piece of junk on.
|
| I use the bad Mac onboard for almost all work conferencing
| because it's right there and doesn't require me to occupy a
| port on the laptop for in the end just different bad video
| quality.
| knorker wrote:
| This is from 2021 by a good margin. Anything new since i last
| read it, or should this have 2021 in the title?
| mberning wrote:
| It honestly doesn't matter if you primarily use your webcam for
| zoom, teams, etc. you could have an 8k cinema grade camera and
| the image other people will see is still compressed to death
| dogshit.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| The whole webcam market is in a sad state with little to no R&D
| and ridiculous prices. How else is it explainable that the 8-year
| old C920 is still considered a quality leader?
| noxvilleza wrote:
| During COVID I had to shoot some remote video for a short
| segment. Ended up putting my Sony Alpha 7 iii and my (relatively
| awful) Logitech C920 on an Elgato mount setup with roughly the
| same viewport. Connected the camera via a Magewell USB 3 capture
| card to OBS (really great software), and made a virtual output so
| the producer could remotely setup the camera exactly as they
| wanted. For shooting I just swapped scenes so they would watch
| the live Logitech view, and recorded directly onto the device. A
| wonky setup, but the video quality was great.
|
| Getting good lighting was more of a challenge for the next few
| vids.
| josefrichter wrote:
| I did quite a lot of research to find a camera with decent
| picture quality in low light conditions. I do multiple work calls
| almost every evening. I ended up buying also a key light and a
| microphone. I think in this age of remote work, it's the right
| thing to do for your colleagues to invest in this equipment. It's
| kinda annoying when 20 people on the call cannot hear your or see
| you properly.
| alar44 wrote:
| Well the first rule in photography is set up your lighting
| properly. Low light is hard for professionals. Don't expect
| good results in shitty lighting conditions. It's kind of
| important.
| drdec wrote:
| Care to share the results of your research?
| [deleted]
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > Originally, Logitech's higher-end webcams, such as the C920,
| also included dedicated MPEG processing hardware to encode the
| video signal, but removed it at some point
|
| Anyone knows if this is detectable on the hardware side? By
| checking the revision number or features using v4l2-ctl perhaps?
| zajio1am wrote:
| Well, i have Logitech C925e, which has MPEG encoding hardware,
| but as people switched to WebRTC in browsers, it is unlikely to
| get supported in software (browsers).
| lousken wrote:
| I have bought Elgato Facecams for our offices. The image quality
| compared to the previos webcameras I had my hands on is on a
| different level. The sharpening effect was a bit too much but
| their software can be used and save the profile to the camera so
| you only have to fix it once. Otherwise the picture quality is
| amazing and is useable even in badly lit conference rooms.
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| I recently got the Obsbot tiny 4k webcam. Even though 4k won't
| come through on videoconferencing software the color seems much
| more natural than Logitech webcams.
| andai wrote:
| I can't find it but I distinctly remember a HN post a few (1-2?)
| years ago, a blog post rant about how webcams are so bad relative
| to phone cameras.
|
| I think the guy wanted to do a kickstarter to disrupt the
| industry (and 90% of the HN comments were telling him he would
| fail).
| brandoncarl wrote:
| I use Camo (lifetime $79 license) and an iPhone SE I picked up on
| eBay for $200.
|
| I've had dozens of people comment how clear my camera is. Many
| now purchased a similar setup. I used OBS for a long time since
| it was free, but the quality wasn't close.
|
| If you're in a line of work that requires you to stream it's a
| worthwhile investment by a great company that just keeps getting
| better.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I used to use this setup but got tired of turning on the phone
| for meetings and doing that while it's in its stand or messing
| up the camera angle a bit. Camo also sometimes wouldn't connect
| right away which is especially annoying when I'm already
| running late. Did you find a way to mitigate those issues?
| zeristor wrote:
| How fast does my Internet upload connection need to be to share
| 4k video, the CPU fan ramps as it is on the 2019 MBP I'm using.
|
| I'm just curious since so much internet has asymmetrical speeds
| with the focus on downloads.
|
| I'm on 35/5 Mb until upgraded sometime this year I hope.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Even if the stream you are uploading is 720p, having a 4k
| sensor to work from is nice and will usually give you better
| results to a point.
|
| For most meeting applications though, 1080p is fine with even
| half decent lighting.
| gnicholas wrote:
| What do other folks think about the impending ability to use an
| iPhone as the camera for your Mac, with bokeh/blurring built in?
|
| One thing I wonder about is whether the largest phones will be
| too heavy, especially for laptops that were built before this
| capability was anticipated.
| [deleted]
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Considering how so many people on remote video calls look like
| they just got out of bed (wearing a hoodie, messy hair and beard)
| - I want to see less of them, not more.
| dagaci wrote:
| If you want a great webcam, then you can buy something like a
| Canon m50 mirrorless dslr or wire up your phone iphone (or
| samsung!) to you Pc. Eitherway you will end up spending close to
| $1000. Standalone webcam's just dont have the CPU or firmware to
| create great pictures.
|
| The courious thing for me is why the Webcam on my Mac m1 so bad,
| when you know the hardware/firmware involved is so closely
| related to the hardware in the iphone
| post_break wrote:
| The logitech C920 can put out incredible video, if you have
| access to every setting. For some reason logitech puts the
| training wheels on and doesn't let you adjust every single
| setting like gain. There was an incredible app called "webcam
| settings" for mac that let you refine that webcam like putting a
| dslr into manual mode. I was able to get it so dialed in you
| thought it was a top of the line webcam. That software
| unfortunately is gone but sometimes it's not the hardware, it's
| the software. That said I refuse to pay monthly or yearly for
| software to use my phone as a webcam.
| graupel wrote:
| https://github.com/Itaybre/CameraController this replaced
| "Webcam Settings" for me, and it's a brilliant program to pair
| with the C920 and make it look great!
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| On linux you can use v4l2-ctl to fine tune the webcam settings
| (focus, gain, white balance, etc).
|
| The C920 has really poor firmware, none of the auto settings
| work well. Auto focus is particularly bad.
|
| I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings of
| my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions.
|
| The low light performance of the C920 hardware is quite bad,
| but if you have adequate lighting and manually configure the
| setting you can get a pretty good setup.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings
| of my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions."
|
| Yeah I have the same. I have saved settings from guvcview
| which are loaded after boot and after resume from suspend.
| melony wrote:
| The iPhone's camera has more engineering resources poured into it
| than the other three webcams reviewed added together, it is
| disingenuous to expect similar quality.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It's a shame that they'll never have a reason to make a
| standalone webcam using some of their existing tech.
|
| Maybe we just need a software solution that can turn a phone
| into a webcam (edit: oh, Apple did that already)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The webcam market is a niche market. Even game streamers,
| arguably the most "consumer" like target audience that cares
| about quality, will often put the image of their face in a corner
| of their screen.
|
| The simple fact of the matter that the target for webcam seems to
| be to be either good enough or to be better than the competition.
| Neither of those are very high bars.
|
| There are some improvements in webcam land. There's a trend
| towards more higher-quality consumer webcams even if they're
| ridiculously expensive for what they deliver.
|
| One problem I have noticed with using phones as webcams is that
| often the image will look distorted if you're not right in the
| center of the camera. The closer you go towards the edges, the
| more your face will get distorted in width or in height. This is
| a natural consequence of how these tiny lenses are able to get
| such a wide picture so I can't really fault phone manufacturers
| for this, but it's something to keep in mind when you pick the
| more obvious solution and just stick your phone to your monitor.
| wilg wrote:
| I have the Opal C1. It's trying to be better than a normal
| webcam. I'm not in love with it but might work for you:
| https://opalcamera.com/
| klinquist wrote:
| What don't you love about it?
| oats wrote:
| Wait, that /only/ works on MacOS?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Look, my work laptop isn't shit, the hardware specs are actually
| pretty good, much better than my my personal laptop.
|
| Yet for some reason my personal laptop has great camera, display
| is clear, adjusts well to lighting.
|
| My working latptop camera on the other hand is utter garbage.
| It's grainy as hell and seemingly randomly radically changes the
| exposure making me go from vampire in the shadows to a divine,
| blinding glow I have and ISDN H.320 videophone that captures in
| 480i and still displays better, though the camera is much more
| significant than a tiny webcam and can manually adjust setting
| which for reason isn't an option for many laptop webcams.
| zeristor wrote:
| Placement, I perch my C920 on top of the 4k 32" monitor,
| ergonomically at eye height, but that means it's far too high for
| a webcam.
|
| I've been thinking of having a little sling to hold an iPhone in
| the right place but of course that obscures the screen.
|
| Perhaps several cameras that could simulate the image from a
| camera in the centre of a screen is one option, a bit daft, but
| how else.
| gedy wrote:
| I am hoping that Apple's Continuity Camera "just works" as the
| camera and lighting are excellent. I was on the hunt for a decent
| webcam last year and surprised this didn't "just work" already
| without flakey 3rd party apps, etc.
| mcovalt wrote:
| The poor auto exposure and white balance touched on by this
| article really affected my webcam's quality. A lamp in the
| background of my office caused my webcam to choose some setting
| that caused my face to be _very_ red and blotchy.
|
| I'm not being vain. People noticed it and it strained
| conversations. It's harder to effectively communicate when your
| audience is uncomfortable by your appearance. Something to think
| about elsewhere in life.
|
| But I digress. The Logitech software is horrible. I found
| CameraController [0] to adequately solve the problem. It allows
| me to adjust exposure and white balance. Now conversations feel
| more natural at work.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Itaybre/CameraController
| gumby wrote:
| I use these guys' software on my Mac to use an iPhone as the
| webcam. It really does a better job, since I can adjust the
| camera settings.
|
| The next macOS will have this capability baked in so I probably
| won't need the third party software.
| pkamb wrote:
| If I could I'd still be using my 480p external 2003 iSight camera
| through an increasingly ridiculous series of dongles:
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/412516/external-is...
|
| Support though has been removed from Apple Silicon Macs :(
|
| Would be a good project for someone to hack support back in.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| I still have my iSight camera plugged to my Mac. 'Tis a shame
| it won't work when I will upgrade to an M-series Mac even
| though I don't even use the camera for anything.
|
| It definitely does have some overheating issues, but it looks
| too good. I might use the shell and replace the guts with a
| Raspberry Pi powered camera [0] if I can actually get my hands
| on a Pi Zero with the shortage we have right now
|
| [0] https://github.com/maxbbraun/pisight
| lucb1e wrote:
| > If I could I'd still be using my 480p external 2003 iSight
| camera through an increasingly ridiculous series of dongles
|
| Why? 480p does not sound better than today's mediocre webcams,
| does it have some amazing light balance or face detection for
| focus or something?
|
| I would want to do this as well for shits and giggles, a 2003
| webcam with 4 dongles being nearly on par with modern webcams
| is fun / hackery / a conversation starter, but I'm curious if
| it's more than just that. (My own ~2005 webcam simply connects
| with USB and works out of the box on any modern hardware
| running Linux. I suppose I didn't and don't think different
| enough.)
| extra88 wrote:
| The FireWire iSight camera's image looks like ass but it's
| good enough for my potato face.
|
| The camera's bundled FireWire 400 cable connects to a hard
| drive enclosure that also has a FireWire 800 port (the
| camera's cable is detachable so this could be replaced with a
| FireWire 400 to 800 cable). The FireWire 800 cable runs to a
| Thunderbolt 2 dock with a FireWire port and the dock's
| Thunderbolt 2 cable runs to a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter
| connected to an Intel MacBook Pro.
|
| I like built-in, irised camera cover though by twisting it
| open/closed, I often shift the position slightly. The
| camera's stand sits on a box wedged between the wall and my
| monitor; I wish I had a slightly smaller box so the camera
| was a little lower, closer to the top of the monitor.
|
| I had all these parts so it was a zero dollar way to get a
| camera above my external monitor. I might try the free
| version of EpocCam with an old iPhone (too old to work with
| Apple's forthcoming Continuity Camera feature) but that's
| bound to be more fussy to start/stop.
| pkamb wrote:
| Mainly for the external case design, which is still top-
| notch.
|
| http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-isight
|
| Great features too in the magnetic monitor attachment and the
| fancy aperture to close and turn off the camera.
|
| The low resolution is somewhat appealing, in a retro way. If
| I'm going to be using a crappy external webcam it's cool that
| the image looks like an early 2000s PowerBook.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| You can use you phone's camera as a webcam with Reincubate's Camo
| App. This required a wired connection iirc.
|
| You can also use OBS Studio along with a virtual camera plugin to
| use any device which can output directly to your computer.
|
| But most of these solutions do not work on Safari or FaceTime
| unless you manually modify the app.
|
| Now, Apple is going to soon introduce their "It Just Works"
| solution with the next release of macOS and iOS. You will be able
| to use your iPhone's camera as a webcam wirelessly with your Mac
| by just sticking your phone on the back (Apple is partnering with
| Belkin[0] for this stand) [1]
|
| I personally don't care about the camera as much as I care about
| the sound quality.
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/6/23156834/apple-iphone-
| webc...
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10018/
| galad87 wrote:
| Apple introduced a new API in macOS 12.3 to create Core Media
| IO plug-ins that run out-of-process, this kind of new plug-in
| works in Safari and FaceTime too (Camo already uses the new
| API).
| conradfr wrote:
| DroidCamX (for Android, obviously) uses Wifi or USB.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Camo now works with Safari and facetime since an update last
| month
| system2 wrote:
| Sound is easy. Slap a nice Yeti microphone and 2 sound blocking
| foams on the walls, you are good to go.
| feet wrote:
| Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting
|
| What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in
| the laptop
|
| But yea, mic audio is always trash too
| ketzo wrote:
| > just use a decent cam in the laptop
|
| I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than
| laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.
|
| Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding,
| camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens
| quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera
| housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop.
| Phones are "always" (although that might not be true
| forever!) going to have more space for bigger and better
| lenses.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| What a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras
| in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such
| things.
| gbanfalvi wrote:
| Not depthwise.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Neither are phones with great cameras... Which is why
| there are camera bumps.
| fwoty wrote:
| Nobody is buying a laptop with a bump at the top of the
| lid
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Yet
| feet wrote:
| A camera bump could easily be added and with a redesign
| of the palm rest/touch pad area there could be a recess
| or slight curve down to fit, you're absolutely right
| dewey wrote:
| Laptop "lids" are a lot thinner than your average phone,
| they might be able to use a plateau like at the back of
| the phones to house it but I'd guess if there would be a
| simple solution that they could "just" do it would've
| happened already.
| feet wrote:
| Okay? So change it?
|
| Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from
| doing something different?
| sigstoat wrote:
| i'd be first in line for thicker everything, but there is
| a lot more value in thickening the body of a laptop than
| the screen.
| dewey wrote:
| I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not
| a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day
| to the next. Don't you think they would've done that
| instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution
| for the new Continuity camera?
| feet wrote:
| No, I definitely don't expect apple to make rational
| design choices at this point
|
| Exhibit A, this thread
|
| They've been shifting design choices in a direction for
| years and this is what came of it. They could have made
| other choices but did not
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| Designing a laptop by sacrificing portability for camera
| quality is absolutely not rational design. No one is
| walking around taking photos with their macbook.
|
| It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which,
| until recently, most people would use very rarely.
|
| Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop
| would very much fall under irrational.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Apple is always searching for ways to get consumers to
| buy more of their hardware, so this does seem like a
| great way of entrenching users a little bit more.
|
| What I didn't think about in my original comment is that
| their new solution makes use of two of the phones cameras
| (face view and the keyboard view)... I'm not sure
| consumers would be okay with THAT much hardware real
| estate being taken up by the addition of a wide angle
| lens (which is a really cool feature, albeit a bit is a
| gimmick for most). Though I'm sure Apple marketing could
| still make it generally desirable if they wanted to.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Laptop screens are _much_ thinner than phones are thick
| so a phone actually has more space for the camera in the
| dimension that is most restricted.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Simple - camera bump on top edge, corresponding indent on
| bottom edge. My MacBookPro could accommodate a larger
| camera than my iphone.
| dingleberry420 wrote:
| > Laptop screens are much thinner
|
| Do they have to be?
| masklinn wrote:
| They naturally are because there's just not much there,
| it's just an LCD.
|
| Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and
| less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume,
| making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much
| thicker).
|
| It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid
| is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush).
| Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more
| expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better
| supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum
| hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a
| computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that
| expense and inconvenience.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hm. Interesting: you _could_ put the battery in the
| screen making it quite a bit thicker, and then have the
| base thinner, that would change the balance though and it
| might not be as stable when sitting open on a desk. It 'd
| be great to have a 20 hour life laptop though.
| feet wrote:
| Or we could rearrange cooling so fans stay on the bottom
| of the machine with heat pipes leading up to behind the
| screen where the main board is
|
| Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move
| the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them
| underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
|
| This allows for a larger battery with more run time,
| better camera, and it should keep the balance of the
| machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
|
| There are options
| masklinn wrote:
| > that would change the balance though and it might not
| be as stable when sitting open on a desk
|
| Iirc that was one of the SB's issues which the hinge had
| to manage.
|
| And things would probably be worse for a lid filled with
| battery.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, they would be. Still, interesting and I'm wondering
| if there is a way to use this.
| megablast wrote:
| Yes. Think about it.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Phones have camera bumps. And screens could be thicker
| where needed.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Phones have camera bumps.
|
| And that's pretty annoying, a computer lid bump would
| snag into everything.
|
| > And screens could be thicker where needed.
|
| My phone's thrice the thickness of my laptop's lid.
|
| This would increase the laptop's thickness by a lot, and
| mostly by voids.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| The bump would go towards the keyboard, I'd think.
| masklinn wrote:
| There's very little clearance in that direction, and the
| clearance which there is is necessary for the screen /
| lens not to touch the keyboard / case and get scratched.
|
| So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to
| have a notch in the topcase.
|
| And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge
| or below the screen), you need to have that notch through
| or below right below trackpad, which is less than
| optimally comfortable before you even consider that the
| accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the
| camera lens.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If Apple released a notch in the bottom side of their
| macbooks for a camera bump to fit in, everyone would be
| calling them visionary geniuses and they would use it to
| jack up the price 200 dollars more.
| eknkc wrote:
| I have an Apple studio display. That thing is pretty new,
| thick and has an A something chip running iOS inside.
|
| The camera quality is shit. Just garbage.
|
| I don't understand how they manage to do it. I understand
| your comment about laptop screens and it makes sense
| however none of the third party external webcams and even
| a non space constrained Apple webcam performs ok.
|
| It's weird.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The Apple Studio Display has a notoriously bad camera.
| https://www.theverge.com/23044788/apple-studio-display-
| webca...
|
| It's suspected it's because they're using a wide angle
| and cropping it tight to do the Center Stage feature.
|
| It's pretty astonishing just how much they managed to
| screw up that monitor's webcam, but it's known to be
| terrible.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Ehhh it's not quite that simple. Optics and sensors have
| requirements that screen builds clash with. You'd need to
| make them thicker, for starters.
| OJFord wrote:
| Why does that mean 'always'? i.e. rephrase GP you quoted:
| 'just use a lot bigger of a cam in the laptop'.
| [deleted]
| nawgz wrote:
| Better to use the browser anyways, your eyes don't divert
| from the screen this way. Much more subtle
| nojito wrote:
| >What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam
| in the laptop
|
| It will actually almost double the weight of the overall
| laptop if they added the same camera as they do on iPhone.
| feet wrote:
| Yes because iphones are notoriously heavier than macbooks
|
| WHAT, its a pocket device and you think a component from
| that pocket device will double the mass of a 6lbs
| laptop????
|
| I really hope you're being sarcastic
| nojito wrote:
| It's simple math. To hold the camera housing of an iPhone
| camera the thickness has to go up which means the entire
| top lid needs to become thicker. This will easily double
| the weight of the laptop.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| Objection. Huawei has a webcam coming out of the
| keyboard:
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/25/17050098/huawei-
| matebook-...
| jkestner wrote:
| That's not what they did on the actual iPhone.
| nojito wrote:
| an iPhone is much much smaller than a macbook lid is it
| not?
| [deleted]
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| The simple math tells me the volume of material is not
| double.m when you make the lid thicker. Not sure what
| you're about, it doesn't make sense.
| feet wrote:
| I don't think people in this thread have ever worked with
| or weighed pieces of aluminum, it would explain the
| bizarre perspective
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Only if that means using twice as much metal - I would
| expect instead it'd mean adding a thin strip of metal
| around the circumference of the lid. That would add a few
| grams, I'm sure, but hardly doubling.
| nojito wrote:
| Nope. They need to ensure the same rigidity across the
| entire lid.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I think he means in order to fit a camera you need to
| increase the thickness of the laptops lid. Whether or not
| this leads to double the weight , idk but there is
| definitely a weight increase to fit the camera.
| feet wrote:
| If they did mean it that way it still doesn't make sense
| to me. Where is the extra mass coming from? Are they just
| thickening the whole lid and fill it with solid lead?
| Mass comes from matter, if there isn't matter than there
| isn't mass. Adding a tiny camera, even if they did have
| to increase thickness a tiny bit of the _entire lid_ it
| still wouldn 't even come close to doubling the mass of
| the whole thing on an aluminum body laptop
| googlryas wrote:
| Why does this make you so angry?
|
| Laptops rarely have decent cams, because phones are afforded
| a greater thickness than the typical location of a laptop
| camera(above the screen).
|
| The webcam in my macbook has about 1/8" to work with, whereas
| my phone camera has almost 1/3"
| dangus wrote:
| The 1080p laptop webcam that's in Apple's latest models is
| quite a decent camera that benefits from the ISP in Apple
| silicon. Even the ancient 720p camera hooked up to that ISP
| managed an incredible amount of improvement over the Intel
| models.
|
| I'd also venture a guess that many other laptops' built-in
| webcams can outperform some of these dedicated units, not
| just the ones that are Apple's iPhone R&D beneficiaries.
|
| "Mic audio is always trash" - again, try a newer Mac notebook
| model. Apple has been investing serious R&D into laptop
| microphones, and I think competitors are taking notice and
| making their own improvements.
|
| It might sound crazy to buy a second phone for this kind of
| thing, but I do think there are people who will get a better
| value out of actually just buying a second iPhone as a
| webcam/streaming camera compared to buying a dedicated
| professional camera.
|
| Unlike a mirrorless/DLSR camera, you can also acquire
| smartphones with deep carrier discounts and long, zero
| interest financing. So, presumably, you could buy yourself a
| new phone, and instead of trading in your old one you could
| use that as a streaming webcam.
|
| Don't forget that iPhones aren't just $1000 luxury phones,
| Apple's cheapest new model is $429 and will stomp all over
| any dedicated webcam on this list. If you jump on the used
| market you can buy something like an iPhone 11 or XR for
| under $300 or $200 and still have a really solid webcam (as a
| bonus, you don't have to care about the condition of the
| battery).
| jsdwarf wrote:
| Internal cams in laptops are considered commodities by the
| laptop manufacturers: they need to put _any_ HD webcam in
| their product or no customer will buy it, but nobody picks a
| laptop model just because it has an excellent webcam.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Hell with zoom you don't need OBS. Get a cheap $20 capture card
| and an HDMI cable, you're all set.
| fartcannon wrote:
| We don't need to do video calls. They are superfluous. In fact,
| most interactions can just be emails.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| If Apple can equip their iPhone with such a great webcam, why
| won't they just put the same camera in MacBook/iMac?
| supreme_berry wrote:
| jmu1234567890 wrote:
| The lid is too thin
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| iMac?
| extra88 wrote:
| That's fair, the current iMac is only 1.15cm thick but
| that's much thicker than an iPhone
|
| They did put a much better camera in the Studio Display but
| it's significantly thicker than the iMac; I don't know how
| thick it is without stand/mounting hardware but the VESA
| mount version is 3.1cm thick so the Display itself much be
| at least 2cm.
| zf00002 wrote:
| Dash cams, even the higher end ones, have the same image quality
| problems.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is one those markets that clearly doesn't appreciate picture
| quality enough. I have at least 6 different web cams and have the
| same experience as the author that they are all crappy in
| slightly different ways.
|
| It seems the point-and-shoot camera makers have all the parts and
| technology available to their teams to make a really nice pro-
| sumer web cam and given they are looking for adjacent markets I'm
| kind of surprised there aren't any out there. They all seem to
| have the equivalent of 'camo' (aka software that turns the camera
| into a web cam) but none of them seem to have packaged a camera
| specifically for this niche.
| keyle wrote:
| If you feed 4K at 60fps to your computer, that's another thing it
| has to digest on top of your running application, and 4K screen
| presentation downsized to 720p.
|
| Besides, have you ever wanted to see every pimples on the face of
| your co-workers?
|
| The image needs to be good enough to capture body language and
| minor frowny attitudes, but a stunning picture won't fix the fact
| that your product is late, your co-workers are slow, and it's
| Monday.
| [deleted]
| pintxo wrote:
| As I had a Canon DSLR lying around during Covid, I have
| repurposed it to a webcam using Canons webcam driver:
| https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se...
|
| Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using
| the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur,
| depending on your used lens. For power there are modified
| "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.
| lexx wrote:
| I've done exactly the same with a canon dslr. Everybody asks me
| if I am a streamer
|
| Many are jealous, i think. It's hard to understand through
| their poor webcams haha
| nextos wrote:
| Would it not overheat after some time?
| wyager wrote:
| Sony A6 series - yes.
|
| Sony A7 series - no.
|
| Fujifilm, any version - no.
|
| Based on my (sparse) experience.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Some models definitely overheat. Some models also don't have
| clean HDMI output.
|
| Basically, you can't just buy a random mirrorless or SLR
| camera and hope it works. You have to pick from a smaller
| list of known-good setups.
| draw_down wrote:
| Yes, that is only one of the hassles with this approach. When
| it works it does look great however.
| pintxo wrote:
| I have had no heating problems whatsoever. Mostly its been in
| use for 1-2 hour sessions at a time, occasionally longer. I
| do turn the camera off in between though, so it's not turned
| on 24/7.
|
| Most annoying is a bug in the Canon webcam driver, if the
| camera is switched off, it displays a static image, which
| somehow fully occupies a single core on my machine. I would
| have thought encoding a still image into a video stream
| should be doable with less cpu cycles.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Not in my experience. I'm curious why you would you expect it
| to overheat?
| alar44 wrote:
| If the camera wasn't designed for video the sensor can over
| heat as it takes power to drive it.
| nextos wrote:
| Some cameras are not designed to record HD video during
| long periods of time.
| jhgb wrote:
| Does it need to be recording? Perhaps you could just
| capture live HDMI output.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| This is a confusion of terms. By "recording" people can
| mean both writing data to the card and activating the
| sensor to receive information. The latter is what
| overheats a camera, and the process is the same for both
| sending data directly to HDMI or recording it to a card.
| Some older sensors on Canon digital SLRs would actually
| begin to burn themselves out just by having the screen
| display what the sensor was receiving (also known as
| "live view") for more than about 10 minutes.
| lexx wrote:
| For those that want to make their canon work in linux, check
| this guide
|
| https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/canon-dslr-webcam-debian...
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| The problem is auto focus. Only modern mirrorless (and a few
| DSLRs) cameras have eye detection, and are actually good at
| keeping the focus.
|
| Hopefully in a few years we will have cheap versions with
| excellent AF.
| m463 wrote:
| Turn it to manual focus and set the focus and depth of field
| appropriately?
| wyager wrote:
| The lack of AF is a feature, not a bug. I replaced my AF lens
| with eye AF with a manual focus lens on my work webcam. The
| DoF zone indicates to other viewers if I should be
| conceptually "in focus" at that point in the meeting (i.e. I
| am speaking or directly engaging with the speaker). Otherwise
| I recline and go slightly out of focus.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Here's a question: why do people care so much about what they
| look like or how the camera displays them? Personally, I care
| more about the content being delivered than what someone
| (including the scene) looks like.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Bad image quality (picture or video) is distracting for some
| people. With a natural looking video you can focus on the
| content being delivered.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _I care more about the content being delivered than what
| someone (including the scene) looks like._
|
| IMO, we all want to believe that but we really don't. All other
| things being equal, a professional-looking setup will trump
| someone streaming from their messy bedroom unless the content
| is _really that good_ , which it typically isn't. Conscious or
| not, first impressions are a thing.
|
| This is the type of opinion that used to infuriate me as a
| young programmer, as I used to think that good code presented
| badly would win over bad code presented nicely. I can now admit
| that I was wrong, and I therefore always invest some time in
| making everything look as nice as possible. Making my delivery
| more professional has not shown any downsides yet.
| dagmx wrote:
| Humans care in general, even if they think they don't. We
| respond better to higher quality rendition of facial
| expressions.
|
| Google search has degraded so I can't find it, but I remember a
| couple years ago that a study showed people subconsciously
| associate image quality and lighting to status. People with
| better lighting look richer and of higher status.
|
| It's unfortunate, but it's unsurprising.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| This is a question outside the scope of webcams alone ... Most
| people, consciously and subconsciously, judge people by their
| appearance.
| standardUser wrote:
| It matters a lot for adult camming, or any camming where the
| physical appearance is part of the appeal.
| traviswt wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone obviously, but for me, lower quality
| setups are distracting and make it hard to focus on the
| material. Good setups "disappear" and let the content shine.
|
| I think we only notice quality setup on video calls now because
| that one person that cares stands out.
| thecybernerd wrote:
| When will 4K HDR video conferencing or even 1080p SDR become the
| norm? 3 years out? 5 years?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| On the consumer side: not until people can actually afford
| casually dedicating the bandwidth necessary to deal with
| multiple 4k streams. Because either you need a truly
| monumentally liberal internet plan for sending uncompressed 4k
| at a normal frame rate, or you need a hardware encoder (baked
| in to your motherboard or discrete graphics card, or as
| separate purchase) to make sure you can send compressed 4k. And
| that only covers the sending part, you need to also receive and
| have the hardware capable of smoothly rendering the 4k video
| stream you're receiving.
|
| But more importantly, on the industry side: given that live TV
| broadcasts are still 1080p, the answer here is almost certainly
| "not until the broadcasting world decides live 4k by default is
| even remotely worth it."
| LegitShady wrote:
| What's the financial incentive? Everyone who needs 4k streams
| is making money off them, and spends money on fancier camera
| gear. Most people just don't need it, so there's no money to be
| had.
|
| It's hard finding a 60fps 1080p webcam that has a deep in focus
| region to minimize focus hunting and that isn't bad image
| quality, and that's way more useful.
| quartz wrote:
| I upgraded my video and audio setup during the pandemic since I
| figured even at up to $1k it was cheaper than the office space it
| was replacing.
|
| After about a month of research I was surprised to find how
| difficult it was to evaluate options and how few of those options
| were plug-and-play.
|
| I had assumed the explosion in livestreaming over the last few
| years would mean best practices would be easy to find and great
| high quality cameras purpose built for streaming would exist, but
| didn't find that to be the case at all.
|
| Ultimately I took a chance on a heavily discounted open box ZV1
| but it wasn't until I married it with a 4k capture card (USB
| streaming was meh), a key light (lighting matters so much!), a
| mic (& arm to hold it), AND an ali-express battery-to-dc
| connector (so it could run all day) that I finally hit the sweet
| spot of "clearly better" and "easy to use all day".
|
| Worth it in the end, but a lot of work.
| clan wrote:
| Seen a lot of "meh" videos. But Julie Schiro has made a few
| actually good videos
|
| https://m.youtube.com/c/JulieSchiro/videos
|
| Personally I just wish that people would invest in a cheap $20
| or so lavalier microphone.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Note that going that cheap on a lavalier only works if it is
| hard wired. If you are going wireless you are easily busting
| $150.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| This is my exact experience, except with an A6000 that I
| already owned. I wouldn't recommend it for most people since
| like you said there's a lot of accessories required to get a
| good result, but for people like me who enjoy iterating on
| their home office setup it's a fun project.
|
| My favorite feature of DSLR/MILC webcams is the depth of field
| effect. It's pretty subtle, but adds an air of professionalism
| vs the default zoom background blur feature.
|
| I'll probably get key lights at some point but in the mean time
| I'm using regular floor lamps with Hue bulbs, which does let me
| do things like play with the light color. I've found a very
| slight purple hue in the background really makes the foreground
| pop.
| indymike wrote:
| I bought a samsung a51 phone on clearance at Target and installed
| iruincam on the mac (for Linux I use droidcam). Much higher
| quality than a the Brio it replaced.
| logifail wrote:
| There is a reason that for hundreds of years painters and (later)
| photographers have preferred working in spaces with North-facing
| windows[0], and that is because it's a simple way of ensuring
| neutral, even light. My home office is (by design) in a room with
| one North-facing window.
|
| I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my
| webcam feed is. I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly
| brilliant, it's that if you know even a little about photography,
| you can do an awful lot to help ensure a good picture.
|
| [0] assuming they were in the Northern Hemisphere, of course
| robonerd wrote:
| I prefer to sit with my back facing a southern window. Washing
| out my webcam is my little petty protest against the use of
| video chat.
| Fnoord wrote:
| I mean, if I was working from home and if I were to have to
| use such I'd need to use one of my kid's rooms.
| modeless wrote:
| However, using a better camera is easier than remodeling your
| house.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my
| webcam feed is._
|
| What's your secret for overcoming the C920's shitty color
| reproduction where the auto white balance makes everything
| extremely blue? I hate mine and am thinking about returning it
| as defective.
| nickjj wrote:
| > What's your secret for overcoming the C920's shitty color
| reproduction where the auto white balance makes everything
| extremely blue?
|
| You can disable all automatic settings and then you can
| manually configure things however you want based on your
| environment. The only issue is every time you reboot it tends
| to get reset.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Not only do the manual settings get unset constantly, but
| also they need to be adjusted throughout the day. :(
| jrk wrote:
| Lighting and composition can do a lot to compensate for a weak
| camera, but read the post: this isn't saying "Zoom video looks
| bad [potentially because of bad lighting and composition],"
| it's saying "even high-end webcams are enormously worse than
| even old, low-end/front-facing cell phone cameras in the same
| conditions, and it's not getting better."
|
| So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps. But this
| post is showing that a better (but similarly sized or even
| smaller) camera helps enormously, and the webcam market is
| persistently unwilling/unable to give them to us.
| logifail wrote:
| > So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps
|
| $63 on a C920, add one window (typically ships free with your
| house/apartment) plus access to one truly special light
| source which although it's 93 million miles away you were
| lucky enough to get a free lifetime subscription to when you
| arrived on this planet.
|
| Why spent time worrying about what a cell phone camera can
| achieve in poor or uneven lighting if a bog-standard webcam
| can do a really good job if you just fix the damned lighting?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > if you just fix the damned lighting?
|
| How do I add a new window to my apartment??
|
| Yes, all cameras look good with great natural light. That's
| not particularly interesting or useful, because we're not
| always in perfect lighting to compensate for mediocre
| cameras that've stagnated for 10 years.
| bjourne wrote:
| The point of the article is that even a shitty old cell
| phone handily beats a "mid-range" C920 webcam. Yes,
| lighting conditions are important to photography, but, as
| the author demonstrates, cell phone cameras are better even
| in those scenarios. Furthermore, if you live in northern
| latitudes you get very little sunlight during the winter so
| a "window" is not a sufficient solution.
| logifail wrote:
| > Furthermore, if you live in northern latitudes you get
| very little sunlight during the winter so a "window" is
| not a sufficient solution
|
| Perhaps I wasn't clear: a North-facing window _never_
| gets direct sunlight, but doesn 't matter because we're
| after _neutral, even light_.
|
| Certainly not "direct light", not even "lots of light".
|
| Just neutral, even light. It's worked for artists for
| centuries.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| What they're saying is that if you live north enough,
| you're likely to be working during a time when there _is
| no sunlight_. A window does nothing when it's dark
| outside by the time your 4p.m. meeting comes around
| Retric wrote:
| It's still easy to add indirect lighting at night, but
| you need to cover up southern faction windows in the
| daytime.
| chownie wrote:
| At my latitude I'll lose sunlight at 2pm in the middle of
| winter. I can fix the webcam, I can't fix how much
| sunlight is available in my locale.
| Retric wrote:
| You don't need sunlight for even indirect lighting.
| joe-collins wrote:
| My current apartment has no south windows. The previous
| unit had none east. Before that, no north. Before that, no
| south _or_ north windows.
|
| "Just" fixing some problems can be a luxury.
| logifail wrote:
| > "Just" fixing some problems can be a luxury
|
| It really needn't be. (Proper) photographers have been
| dealing with these very same issues for longer than we've
| all been worrying about how we look on Zoom.
|
| _Window Light: The Biggest, Bestest Softbox You Already
| Own_ :
|
| "Let's say your windows are west-facing and you want to
| shoot in the afternoon. And you're really terrified of
| hard light. Keep thinking of your window as a softbox.
| You just need what they refer to in film production as a
| "silk". The same material (ripstop nylon) that is found
| on the front of most softboxes can be placed in front of
| your window to turn hard, late day light into a glowing,
| golden, majestic light bath for your subject's face."[0]
|
| [0] https://fstoppers.com/education/window-light-biggest-
| bestest...
| SapporoChris wrote:
| I think I understand your point, under ideal or almost
| ideal conditions most webcams can work fine.
|
| However, most people are not graced with the
| understanding of lighting and how cameras work. There's
| lots of opportunity to compensate or at least guide
| people with better hardware and software. The work done
| with smartphone cameras is clear evidence of this.
| yunohn wrote:
| I'm confused why you're harping on about windows - which
| cannot be guaranteed in direction, location, size, or
| number in any house unless you build it yourself.
| Further, outside of the equatorial region, sunlight is
| also not guaranteed throughout the day during the year.
|
| Clearly, your solution is neither "easy" nor optimal.
| Glad that it works for you, but it's not for everyone.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Which is a great option, at least if you can plan your
| Zoom meetings by the correct time for ideal sunlight!
|
| Unfortunately, this isn't the case for most people.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _$63 on a C920_
|
| Damn that's cheap, where's that price from?
| criddell wrote:
| They're $59.99 on Amazon right now.
| WheatM wrote:
| Imagine the mind blowing privilege of not just having a
| separate home office, but having being able to design it to
| yoru exact specifications with a window facing north, and
| telling people to "just add windows". Some people on here
| are so out of touch.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| jotm wrote:
| Indeed, if people cared enough, they'd be able to get amazing
| results out of any hardware.
|
| I also have a window that faces North, I use the rule of thirds
| to better place myself in front of the camera, I only do video
| calls during the day, and I have a cat that can distract people
| at key moments.
|
| People always say my video looks brilliant.
|
| I only use my Panasonic X2000 as a webcam.
| altcognito wrote:
| Also, my experience with the 920 Is that it performs well
| (better than others I have) in low light. None of the samples
| from the article were low light. Most folks are in dimly lit
| conditions, and that's where these tend to do better.
|
| Fundamentally, webcams suffer from the same problem as n95
| masks: prior to the pandemic, everything was geared towards
| cheap, it just wasn't a huge market. To invest in retooling
| would be a risk, there is no guarantee the market will be
| there.
|
| People are throwing a thousand dollars at phones with a
| significantly better profit margin. Webcams will NEVER catch
| up. He pretty much says this at the end of the article.
| wwilim wrote:
| My home office faces north and I do look alright on a webcam
| (T470 and now some kind of Thinkbook equivalent), but the dim
| light all day gives me SAD. I'm on the lookout for a few 4k
| lumen LED panels
| jjeaff wrote:
| Or, just turning on any bright lights will do wonders. Most
| people have very dim lighting.
| logifail wrote:
| > just turning on any bright lights
|
| Umm, it really depends _where_ those lights are relative to
| the camera.
|
| None of us look our best when light brightly from directly
| overhead, or from one side, or - if you're really after that
| Dracula look - from directly underneath.
|
| The sun is a unique (free!) light source, particularly if
| you're able to get access through a North-facing window. It's
| quite costly (time and money) to get anywhere close to
| replicating that effect using artificial lighting.
| ruined wrote:
| if you don't have a window, you have a wall. do you have a
| desk lamp? point it at your wall. instant softbox
| ec109685 wrote:
| I know what you're getting at, but for people who can't
| rearrange their house, good lighting is definitely cheaper
| than a north facing window :)
| oittaa wrote:
| Exactly. I put couple of Ikea Torsbo(? or something
| similar, can't remember the exact model) next to my
| monitor and they provide nice soft light to the face,
| which amazes some people. Literally spending 20EUR on
| some cheap tabletop lamps would improve the quality
| dramatically for most of the people. I don't even have
| any fancy cameras, just a Logitech Streamcam I bought
| from some discount sale.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Tokabo? https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tokabo-table-lamp-
| with-led-bulb...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It blows people's minds how much a few good practice
| suggestions change their image. I come from a film background
| and get requests for help by colleagues and friends constantly.
| I almost always just reposition their camera and move a lamp
| nearby to use as a key if they have no window, or as a kicker
| if they do.
|
| It's really easy to teach yourself this stuff, it's not magic.
| Most people just assume their gear is either too cheap or
| they're too ignorant to get it. 5-10min of research and 5-10min
| of implementation will do wonders for most people.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Care to share some quick tips?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Sure!
|
| 1) Avoid fluorescent lighting like the plague. You'll look
| sickly.
|
| 2) Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your
| lighting is inadequate. It can be small it doesn't matter.
| Place it diagonally from you at eye level.
|
| 3) Camera at eye level.
|
| 4) If you want to get fancy, get another lamp higher above
| you (several feet) and place it opposite your main lamp for
| a backlight. So if your main light is front right, this one
| is back left. It needs to be weaker than your main light
| source. This is called an "edge" or a backlight. It gives
| your hair a soft glow up top that separates you from the
| background.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Camera at eye level is very hard when your giant monitor
| is at eye level. I almost wish there was some way to make
| monitors act like teleprompters.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yeah that's always a factor. If you can't you can't,
| simple as that. It just helps make you look less
| distracted as well as makes you "more flattering."
| Definitely don't have it angled up if you can avoid it or
| you look patronizing.
| ryanklee wrote:
| The top of your monitor should also be eye level, and
| slightly angled up, so you never look up, only straight
| or down. Better for your neck. If you're doing this, then
| your webcam will also be nearly eye level as well.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Thanks!
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your
| lighting is inadequate.
|
| Just buy a high-CRI LED bulb from the hardware store.
|
| It shouldn't necessarily be "warm". In an office only
| used during daylight, and lit with commercial lighting, a
| "warm" bulb is going to look extremely orange and out of
| place.
|
| What matters most is matching color temperatures of your
| light sources.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Obviously you should find a color temperature that works
| for your setting, but in general, warm is a safer bet for
| preserving skin tones unless you are actively fighting
| daylight bulbs in the room.
|
| Since warmer tones tend to be safer, I recommend it in
| the absence of more specifics about the environment. But
| you're right, it's not always the best fit.
| shados wrote:
| Also the vast majority of people using these web cams don't
| have nearly enough lighting. When there isn't enough, the
| software cranks up the ISO to ridiculous level which gives that
| distinctive "webcam grain" look thats awful.
| m463 wrote:
| Phone cameras seem to be extremely sensitive - even an old
| iphone 8 camera can see well in near-dark conditions. Don't
| see why webcams can't do this.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| > _I don 't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant_
|
| I used to sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, and I
| often received compliments on my webcam quality when I used a
| C920e, which I think has the same quality as the C920.
|
| Don't underestimate absolutely _horrendous_ laptop webcams
| becoming normalized, especially after stream compression.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Webcams feel like a deadend technology like self-rewinding
| cassettes on the eve of the release of the compact disc.
|
| The fidelity is garbage relative to something like a DSLR inside
| an Errol Box[1] and miles away from Starline style holography[2].
| Eye contact is poor. Putting in a software filter to fix eye
| contact should be universal practice at this point. Hell even
| getting basic ring light next to your lens is universal amongst
| gen-z streamers and completely absent from gen-x remote workers.
|
| With the chip shortage mostly over I'm amused how many people
| working at MANGA, nominally our most proficient tech workers
| bringing in half a million dollar salaries, are just phoning it
| in with garbage setups, trivially fixed by watching a 15 minute
| youtube video on how to position your desk to capture natural
| light, use a wired microphone that you already have in your
| drawer somewhere, and check three boxes under settings.
|
| I'm not proposing to get a studio, just maybe give your fellow
| humans the decency of picking up your emotional nuance if you're
| transitioning to not seeing them in person.
|
| [1] https://ma.tt/2020/05/ceo-video-streaming
|
| [2] https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
| krono wrote:
| Not entirely sure if this was meant as satire, but in case it
| wasn't: If I wanted to be judged on my physical looks or the
| quality in which those are presented to others over the wire, I
| would have been working in the film industry.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Genuinely believe a loss in fidelity moves us from acceptable
| telepresence to uncanny valley.
|
| Landlines had exceptional fidelity and let one pick up the
| nuance of a person's emotional state. Today's cellular
| connections not so much. Thankfully things like Apple
| Facetime (audio only) recapture some of that.
|
| Likewise with a high quality webcam I think it's important to
| treat your coworkers with respect by giving them the grace of
| seeing your body language in high resolution if you're going
| to opt out of physical meetings. Remote work is fine, just
| don't phone it in with the equivalent of 2000's era potato
| camera.
| krono wrote:
| This addendum clarifies your reasoning a lot!
|
| I agree in that improved audiovisual quality would be
| beneficial, but, at least for regular video calls, I don't
| believe it's reasonable to expect for people to go out of
| their way to do better than the quality their (not too old)
| laptop provides - not past ensuring they're in a reasonably
| quiet environment with halfway decent lighting anyway.
|
| Besides, recent generations of laptops are finally shifting
| to better quality webcams and microphones. We'll get to
| where we'd both like it to be, eventually :)
| aquajet wrote:
| I grew up just as landlines were giving way to cell phones.
| How did high fidelity let us pick up on emotional state?
| xfitm3 wrote:
| I intentionally scale down my video as I don't want to be
| seen. Being on video requires a lot of cognitive effort,
| which I'd rather conserve to do actual work.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| You know what's vastly worse than a co-worker whose camera has
| a sub-optimal image quality? A co-worker who's constantly
| struggling to get their overkill setup to behave, wasting
| everyone's time while they fix the mix on their audio or switch
| cameras because their mirrorless camera turned itself off from
| thermal overload yet again.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| 100% this
|
| Literally just use a wired microphone for instance and not
| only will one have better fidelity but one also immediately
| gets past the "Can you guys here me?" one finds with airpods
| or fancy wireless gaming headsets.
| bradknowles wrote:
| I first saw this article years ago, and I'm glad to see it has
| been updated with some more modern webcams.
|
| I'm also sad to see that the state of the art in this space
| hasn't changed much for webcams, especially on the Mac.
|
| I do have an older iPhone 7 that I could put to use like this,
| but I'm starting to become convinced that maybe I actually do
| need to buy a somewhat newer iPhone device with multiple lenses,
| and use that instead -- for the same reason that my iPhone 7 is
| now obsolete for personal use and has since been replaced by an
| iPhone 13 Pro Max.
|
| Camo looks nice!
| gnabgib wrote:
| Yeah it's a 2020 article that HN commented on quite extensively
| within a month of original post: 196pts, 289 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460
| oxfeed65261 wrote:
| As a longtime, happy user of an iPhone 6S (on my third battery,
| second screen, and second charging port), I am curious as to
| why you consider the iPhone 7 to be obsolete for personal use.
| I know that later models have better screens, cameras,
| processors, etc., but I have a crisp Retina display and all
| functionality I use seems fine.
| worldmerge wrote:
| Why can't apple put the iphone rear camera in the MacBook?
| macintux wrote:
| iPhone is dramatically thicker than the laptop lid. I don't
| know how much of that is the camera, but given that they have
| to have a bump to fit the lenses, it seems unlikely to be
| practical.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Camo is fine, but is there a third party app that I can just buy
| without a subscription?
| DHPersonal wrote:
| You can buy a Camo lifetime license for $80 USD.
| extra88 wrote:
| Is that a lifetime of upgrades or is it merely a perpetual
| license that doesn't stop working simply because your
| subscription ran out?
| brunick wrote:
| Yup, droidcam obs - you'll need obs with the plugin, but its a
| one time fee
|
| Its pretty nice in my opinion, have been using it the last 2
| years without a flaw
| kristjansson wrote:
| A substantial advantage to Reincubate's product is the ability to
| control the camera settings that would otherwise be relegated to
| some auto-focus auto-lighting software. In a dark room, for
| example, one can choose to slow the shutter speed way down,
| trading some motion blur for a better static image. I hope they
| can continue to provide those features on top of Continuity
| Camera after it launches with Ventura.
| dheera wrote:
| For a REALLY good webcam just get a Pi Zero (v1), Pi HQ camera, a
| good C-mount lens, and flash this firmware:
| https://piwebcam.github.io/ which makes the Pi Zero appear as a
| regular USB webcam when plugged in, and also gives you a telnet
| thing to control camera parameters.
|
| It's particularly nice because it doesn't mount any filesystems
| in RW mode, so you can just plug and unplug it as needed.
|
| There are also some enclosures you can 3D print for this
| combination.
| slotrans wrote:
| I bought an iPod Touch (~$100) to use with Camo Studio. It works
| great. Lets me keep my laptop lid closed all the time which I
| prefer, and the video quality is much much better than the built-
| in camera. The software costs a little but it's well-made and I
| don't mind paying for stuff that does what it's supposed to do.
| regularfry wrote:
| I'm quite fond of a raspberry pi hd camera and showmewebcam. The
| problem I've got is that the only lenses I've got to hand mean
| that I need to mount the camera about a metre behind the monitor,
| which is really annoying. Definitely need a wider angle lens.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This is a symptom of the race to the bottom in the digital camera
| industry. Most webcams are built around low cost modules running
| firmware developed by an OEM who made it good enough to ship and
| nothing more. They don't have any incentive to improve the
| features beyond banner specs and their buyers have little
| influence.
| spsphulse wrote:
| You can still get quite an improvement by tweaking settings.
|
| I followed this[1] video tutorial. I was surprised to see
| especially how much of a difference white-balancing and using a
| custom LUT does.
|
| https://youtu.be/8WSB2OtXysU
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| My theory is just that video conference applications should
| inject whatever horrible things you are doing to your image to
| the other image :)
|
| If your camera shakes while you type, your view of the other
| person will shake too. If you have a horrible echo, so will the
| other person. If you are backlit with dim light, get ready for a
| dim, grainy view of the other person. Low res? Blown highlights?
| Yep, we can show you that. The goal is to setup the incentives
| correctly. Most people seem to appreciate a good view of their
| peer but many can't seem to be bothered to do the work
| themselves.
|
| Friendlier alternative: Build classifiers for the 10 most common
| 'you look bad' situations and have the video conference app turn
| on the 'dummy lights' (to borrow from cars) that warn you what's
| up and how to fix it.
| chubs wrote:
| This is something i've struggled with for a while, working
| remotely for years now, and not wanting to be depersoned by my
| team never seeing my face. I tried a logi 920, which i thought
| was pricey for a webcam, but the image quality is terrible. And
| every time it starts up, it runs in 60hz anti-flicker mode which
| flickers like crazy here in australia where we run 50hz power, so
| i have to start their awful software to change the setting.
| Eventually I returned it and got a canon m50. Image quality is
| good now. I saw some people on the internet saying it could be
| powered through the usb connection but that turned out to be
| false, so i have to change the battery every few days which is
| frustrating. I know you can get a pass-thru 'battery' that
| connects to a mains adapter, ive yet to try that. Also
| frustrating is having to reach up and turn it on before a meeting
| and off at the end. Next macOS has the feature to use an old
| iphone as a camera. If this works seamlessly (eg i can mount the
| phone behind my monitor and it charges itself and turns on and
| off automatically) it'll be even better.
| tapland wrote:
| I used to be able to set the exposure manually on my webcams in
| windows (more granular than the 7 levels I'm offered now). That
| option just disappeared a few content updates ago on win 10, so
| now I can't even fix my own lighting. I think it was mjpg support
| that was just removed?
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| The supply and demand curves for high quality webcams do not
| intersect.
|
| There is no price/quantity combination that will satisfy both
| producers and consumers.
| rlei wrote:
| I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam
| designed to solve some of these problems.
|
| There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home
| office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks
| that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the
| bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped
| releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it
| remained the bestselling phone through now.
|
| A few thoughts to add to the article:
|
| - On why webcams aren't seeing innovation, I'd disagree that the
| market is too small. There's enough gross margin to produce a $B
| company just by selling webcams [0], especially if you can
| actually get customers excited about the product.
|
| - A big reason there hasn't been innovation is that the space
| doesn't attract entrepreneurs (because hardware is viewed as
| hard) or investors (because hardware is viewed as hard).
|
| - Size isn't everything. As the iPhone shows, you can get very
| good image quality from a tiny sensor and lens if you have the
| right tech supporting it. (At Lumina, most of our eng effort is
| on the software layer)
|
| I would've loved to see Lumina in his comparison. We launched a
| few months ago and are seeing many reviewers prefer us over the
| Brio (Logitech's flaghip) [1]. Personally, I'd guess we're 60% of
| where we can be in terms of quality and think we can achieve a
| quality level between an iPhone and a DSLR, hopefully closer to
| the latter.
|
| [0]
| https://s1.q4cdn.com/104539020/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/...
|
| [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/lumina-ai-webcam-review
| kozak wrote:
| Sad to see such an imperfect monitor mount type on a webcam
| that tries to be better. For better eye contact, lens should be
| as low as possible to be as closer to where you are looking as
| possible. This one doesn't seem to even try.
| derelicto wrote:
| Thank you for focusing into this space.
|
| Is there a reason why the lumina webcams only focus on going up
| to 30/40 fps and not 4k/60fps? Are there plans to improve that
| aspect?
| pryelluw wrote:
| Whats the privacy factor like? Does the camera software phone
| home? Do you track users ?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I don't understand the business model / viability of dedicated
| webcams. Software like Elgato Epoccam or OBS is free or cheap,
| and the % of people who would benefit from a decent webcam and
| who don't own a modern smartphone is literally 0.
| AngryData wrote:
| Ive only ever had trouble with using phones as webcams. It
| seemed like a great idea, but ive probably wasted a good full
| 40 hours of my life trying to make them work right. And when
| I get it to work, 6 months go by and they force you to
| "update" to more broken features and then charge money for
| basic functionality. Whoops this software doesn't let you
| flip the camera the right way. This one doesn't like USB for
| some reason so lets try wireless, whoops it completely
| saturated the wireless connection with completely
| uncompressed video and drains my phone faster than it can
| charge. This one ghosts horribly if you move slightly too
| fast. Oh this one seems to be work... what the hell I dared
| put my hand to close or a light source came in view for a
| second and it completely bjorked the exposure levels and
| fails to readjust again leaving an either mostly black or
| mostly white picture.
|
| Since I don't use it constantly, if I expect to be using a
| webcam I need to make sure I have atleast a couple hours the
| day before I need it to make sure it actually works when I
| turn it on again. And even then I still run in to troubles
| where certain programs see it and certain ones don't. Then I
| gotta push the video through multiple different programs to
| get the one program I need to see it right in the correct
| orientation. What I thought should be a super easy task turns
| into this huge ordeal and 25 new sketchy data stealing
| programs on my phone and computer. I even had a few which I
| can only assume were mining crypto currency with the amount
| of processing utilization they used even when the camera
| isn't on.
| andrepew wrote:
| People who have video calls throughout the day constantly. I
| don't want to have to mess around setting up my phone on a
| stand and getting it connected every time I need to do a
| meeting.
| mbreese wrote:
| I also dual call into many meetings. For these, I use my
| phone to see how my screen sharing is working. I have to do
| a lot of screen sharing presentations to present data
| (tables, figures, etc). With this use-case, it's very
| helpful to have a second login to be able to see what
| everyone else is.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Buy an actual camera and use that instead? Basically every
| camera that has video out is pretty easy to get working as
| a webcam these days.
| [deleted]
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Those cost more. It doesn't make sense to spend more than
| needed on something you're only going to use as a webcam.
| Webcams don't have to spend on holdability or physical
| durability or any viewfinding.
| na85 wrote:
| >literally 0
|
| Well it's at least 1 because I bought a "decent webcam" and
| while I own a smartphone I don't want to use that for long
| zoom meetings.
|
| I bought one of those Instagram influencer light rings so I
| actually look normal on camera instead of like a corpse, and
| the camera lives on top of my USB C monitor.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| >There's enough gross margin to produce a $B company just by
| selling webcams [0], especially if you can actually get
| customers excited about the product.
|
| Is this from HW only or some sort of MRR from SW lock-in?
| EwanToo wrote:
| I'd love to try a Lumina webcam but at the moment it'd cost me
| $200 shipping and import tax to the UK.
|
| It's a pretty big punt compared to buying something off Amazon
| that I know I can send back without a quibble if it's no better
| than my Logitech Streamcam.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I'd love to compare lumina too, but you don't support Linux so
| I'll have to accept a crap webcam over a non functioning one.
| markstos wrote:
| Same.
| savy91 wrote:
| You may want to try Obsbot meet, I recently switched to it
| and it's pretty decent on Linux
| hgomersall wrote:
| From the Obsbot site: "The OBSBOT Meet series hardware is
| able to work with both macOS and Linux, but we will not
| make the exclusive software for the Linux operating
| system."
| xeromal wrote:
| I can probably count the number of people on linux who will
| buy this webcam on my two hands.
| walrus01 wrote:
| webcams on linux with good driver support are not just for
| use by humans but in a myriad of industrial/embedded
| applications, for single image acquisition, etc.
|
| don't just think about people using linux desktop PCs in
| home offices, but all forms of other use of camera systems.
| hanselot wrote:
| oliwarner wrote:
| Your 2004 opinion might mean more if we knew how many
| horses ran.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| I can understand the reason for believing there's no
| overlap, as Linux users tend to shy away from tracking-like
| features in general (which is the job of a camera!). But a
| few privacy features like a physical lens cap, and a
| hardware light that turns on if the camera is powered (not
| controlled by software) would really incentivize that
| market, I think.
|
| Linux users still like quality hardware, and are willing to
| pay for it.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Maybe you'd need more hands for counting that number if the
| webcam in question actually worked under Linux?
| m463 wrote:
| I think just supporting UVC instead of doing some other mess
| is what people really want and need.
| lxe wrote:
| I have the Lumina! I think the hardware has been pretty good
| from the very start when I got it about a year ago. The
| software originally was... not very good, but you guys have
| improved it by leaps and bounds over time. I still have to
| manually adjust the exposure (which is fine), and fiddle with
| settings to get the colors right, but it works better than any
| webcam I have so far. Keep up the good work.
| modeless wrote:
| > Size isn't everything. As the iPhone shows, you can get very
| good image quality from a tiny sensor and lens if you have the
| right tech supporting it. (At Lumina, most of our eng effort is
| on the software layer)
|
| This is my problem with all the webcam startups. So what if you
| can mask some of the problems of small sensors and lenses using
| machine learning that adds a whole new set of problems? You
| could have done that without even making hardware at all. We
| have plenty of crappy hardware out there already, and if yours
| is only a minor improvement with the "magic" in software then
| it mostly amounts to a hardware dongle to enforce your software
| license. No thanks!
|
| If you're going to bother making hardware, you should make
| _good_ hardware. That means a big sensor and a big lens. Start
| there, and sure go crazy with the machine learning afterward,
| you 'll get much better results with less effort when you start
| with better input! And you'll have no competition because
| there's literally _nobody_ else out there putting decent lenses
| on webcams.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Completely agree, this is the old adage: "Garbage in, garbage
| out". Improving the data the sensor collects is surely much
| easier than using ML models to correct after the fact. The
| people willing to pay a premium for nice big lenses/sensors
| are the market to go after, everybody else won't care since
| they already feel their current set up is good enough.
| dharma1 wrote:
| I expect mobile phone cameras to kill webcams. All the
| innovation happens there and when people already have
| something getting closer to dSLR quality each year, why
| invest in a specialised webcam?
|
| Apple just needs to bake webcam sharing into iOS/macOS and
| come up with a nice attachment/stand for the phone that works
| with MacBooks and displays so you don't have to look at the
| camera at a weird angle
| ip26 wrote:
| I think mics and webcams suffer a simple problem: the person
| who enjoys the benefit of higher quality is not the operator.
| Indeed, the operator may never experience how they look or
| sound.
| jrockway wrote:
| That might be true, but your reputation is at stake as well.
| For the same reason that you might wear a suit to an
| important meeting, you might also take steps to ensure that
| your video and audio quality are presentable when you're
| having an important meeting virtually. (Of course, once
| you've paid the cost for that, you can just do a good job for
| all meetings. Much easier than a trip to the dry cleaners.)
| berny222 wrote:
| Could you explain what you mean by 'hardware is viewed as
| hard'?
| mchusma wrote:
| I bought a Lumina in December. It still doesn't do automatic
| tuning of the video. Everything requires manual adjustment. I
| can't just have it...work. It requires tons of adjustments. It
| even ships with a color card, which I assume is to
| automatically tune things, but it fails miserably. I have tried
| tuning it a dozen times, but maybe I can get it right until the
| light changes (I am by windows). Finally, after about 5-6
| months of giving leeway, I gave up and uninstalled everything,
| put it in a box in my attic, and went with a 5 year old webcam
| that doesn't look amazing but doesn't look bad.
|
| I have noticed you keep shipping a bunch of random features. I
| could be wrong, but my recommendation is to try and get it to
| automatically work right for 99% of cases without manual user
| input.
|
| (Note I'm on M1 MBA)
| Terretta wrote:
| Agree. I posted a sibling comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31803306
|
| I use this on MBP M1 Max and on Intel MBP2019 16".
| ncmncm wrote:
| What sucks most is that Logitech, which used to be a proud name
| (back when "Feels good / Feels better") has gone totally to
| shit. Even their mice are designed to fail in a year. (Spill on
| the desk, the mouse that only got damp on the bottom is dead,
| dead, dead. That can't be accidental.)
|
| A full article on what went wrong at Logitech corporate could
| be enlightening, if not helpful.
| AngryData wrote:
| Their mice still have the same terrible button that they had
| 17 years ago when I bought an original MX 518 as far as I can
| tell. Ive fixed the button so many times on every mouse from
| them since them. I even made the mistake of buying the re-
| released mx-518 a year ago thinking that since they put this
| new fancy sensor in maybe they fixed the button finally. It
| took 4 months for me to get a double click problem from it
| again that required me to open it up and fix that damn
| microswitch. I don't know what mouse ill get next but ive
| completely given up on logitech.
| eropple wrote:
| Maybe I'm lucky, but I've got half a dozen Logitech wireless
| mice/keyboard-and-trackpad media keyboards in regular use,
| plus the MX Ergo trackball, plus a couple of G Pro keyboards,
| and I haven't been able to kill any of them even through
| pretty rough use on the mice particularly (they tend to get
| bounced around in the living room when the dog jumps on the
| couch, etc.).
|
| "Can't be accidental" reads as conspiracy-huffing. Lemons
| exist, bad products happen, but this is a weird assertion
| without evidence. Like, I got bit by the MX518 double-click
| bug back in the day, but everything I've used from them since
| --and I won't buy Razer because their stuff's awful to look
| at, which has historically cut down the options a lot--has
| been unremarkably fine. Except for the MX Ergo. That thing is
| remarkably excellent.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The software is an abomination too - they switched from a
| native program to an electron app that I'd describe as
| "occasionally functional". And you _do_ need to use the app
| to do simple things like checking battery of wireless
| headphones.
| brightball wrote:
| I like the camera. Any chance of the AI software becoming
| available on Linux?
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| It does seem like a very underserved niche, I hope your product
| works out! Looking for such a cam myself, will give you a good
| look.
|
| Do you do AI and image processing on the camera, or on the host
| system like Logitech/Razer?
| theelous3 wrote:
| > that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones
| after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained the
| bestselling phone through now.
|
| If I can be a bit cheeky - this sounds like exactly the kind of
| frankly ridiculous comparison a founder would make about their
| product alright.
|
| The reality is - nobody really cares _that much_. Whatever
| image you record is going to be gigga-smashed by whatever
| application you squeeze it through. I switch between the
| rubbish builtin on my laptop over wifi, and a gopro tuned to
| the highest res and framerate the cable will take, with colour
| and exposure tuning etc.
|
| Not once person has ever mentioned webcam quality in either
| case. As long as you can vaguely see _most_ of someone's face
| in _somewhat_ balanced light - that's good enough. For 99% of
| people in 99% of cases. Even job interviews where image is
| everything, it's irrelevant.
|
| The problem that needs solving is audio. That actually matters.
|
| I tried ping.gg recently which boasts high quality video and
| audio feeds (for a high price) and even then - meh. Video was
| entirely unimportant.
|
| The only people who really care about live video feed quality
| are content creators with high powered static systems, like
| streamers. Even then, they can just hook up a dslr and smash it
| out of the park with little to no effort.
|
| I don't see this as a real problem anyone bar a select few care
| about - and that select few has already solved the problem
| anyway.
|
| > and think we can achieve a quality level between an iPhone
| and a DSLR
|
| Good luck, but I think you're filling a spectrum nobody is
| concerned about.
| Terretta wrote:
| First, I like what Lumina is trying to do. I pre-ordered, and
| since receiving the first batch, have been, and will keep,
| buying them.
|
| However, caveat emptor. Right now, buyers should support Lumina
| to support innovation in this space, but be prepared to pay a
| quality price while they work on it. Several ideas didn't work
| out, and they're trying to correct. Each software release is
| better, but I worry the hardware sensor in the shipping models
| may just not be up to task.
|
| I have four Brio and four Lumina in our office (several more
| just came!). LogiTune + Brio 4K is surprisingly (given Lumina
| marketing including the post above) better than Lumina in most
| every situation, and drastically better in high contrast
| lighting where Lumina shows severe washouts and color banding.
| Some of the article's shots show washed out yellowing on the
| author's face. Make that problem worse, and you can picture
| what Lumina is struggling with in some lighting. It's probably
| good that he didn't do a comparison _yet_ , though I would note
| that the most recent software release might have done better
| than 75% of those tested in his particular setting.
|
| Meanwhile, if you like Lumina's features but want better video,
| Logitech Brio 4K + Xsplit Vcam gives the same "virtual
| cameraman" pan and zoom, bokeh background softness control,
| virtual green screen, logo/watermarks, and more. Just like
| Lumina that requires a separate app for "pro" mode (aka
| software processed), Brio 4K (also most any webcam works)
| requires Xsplit Vcam to enable those features.
|
| With Lumina the extra app is just enough easier for non-tech
| users to remember, that's the direction I'm leaning for our
| staff.
|
| Going forward, I'd pay 2x the Lumina price for (a) large
| aperture and high dynamic range sensor running off USB-C, and
| another 50% for configurable onboard features like the pan and
| zoom that wouldn't require a helper app and confusing settings
| in Zoom, Teams, etc.
|
| It's certainly possible within the price point. What I likely
| want is something like this on USB-C:
|
| https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect-cameras/produ...
|
| The quality on this 4K sensor + lens array is remarkable, the
| optical tele-zoom fantastic, the low light gathering shockingly
| good. The price point includes a full PoE camera engine and an
| audio mic.
|
| True, so that wouldn't fit in a laptop bag. But iPhone optics
| would fit easily in a Brio housing, and long throw zoom would
| fit in the Streamcam form factor. Given videoconf is now a fact
| of work, I'd argue innovators should not be afraid of a larger
| device to achieve better quality.
|
| Like the author of this article, while I used to use a Sony A9
| for web conferences that matter, now I use iPhone + Camo for
| high value teleconfs. It doesn't have to fit in my bag, I'm
| already carrying it. The innovation needed here is for the
| mount.
|
| All this said, Lumina's software is iterating fast, their
| cameraman is easy and works well, and I am buying more of the
| Lumina over the Brio for our staff.
|
| // @rlei: a few usability notes (1) give us a toggle to turn
| off the default background image (e.g., show black instead)
| while virtual camera is panning in, the default scene generates
| annoyed comments from participants, (2) don't flip from black
| to the live image until the initial pan and zoom is done, and
| (3) consider offering an eye-contact filter and marketing that.
| Staff who prefer Brio affirm they would switch just for that.
| Also, (4), don't make users search email to find a serial
| number to use the helper software with their Lumina camera.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Is there a Mac/Linux equivalent of Xsplit Vcam? Preferably
| without a subscription? (One time purchase is fine)
| pridkett wrote:
| OBS can manage that for you.
| maxique wrote:
| > I would've loved to see Lumina in his comparison. We launched
| a few months ago
|
| The article is from Feb 2021.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Appreciate the effort. I think one thing that hinders
| innovation is that, as soon as anyone makes a decent camera
| that sells well, a company like Logitech will just try a little
| harder and bring a better camera to market at a lower price
| point. It's not like this is rocket science, Logitech just
| doesn't have much incentive to try very hard right now.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Does Lumina work on Linux? I can't really find anything about
| it (there is also a Lumina Desktop Environment for Linux it
| seems), and while it says "Lumina is compatible with Windows
| and Macintosh machine" this can mean "we don't directly support
| Linux, but it should work" (like Logitech), or it can mean "we
| have specialized drivers/software that only work on Windows and
| macOS".
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| If your software works only on Windows, you've written non-
| portable software. Likely, you have all your core logic mixed
| up with Windowsy UI and now you're stuck there.
|
| If it works on Windows and Mac, you've written portable
| software but just can't be bothered to support Linux. At a
| guess the problem is that you want to ship binaries only and
| don't want to deal with doing all the packaging and testing
| for Linux.
|
| For a consumer hardware company, one wonders what the benefit
| is to binaries-only unless you're hoping to charge a
| subscription for the software to run hardware you already
| bought. Or the software is such a mess internally that you'd
| feel ashamed of it were public (which I can understand,
| having seen commercial code). Or you have some security
| feature that you don't want to reveal (e.g. disallowing use
| of your software with third-party hardware). However, if
| someone wants to reverse your software methods, they'll find
| a way.
|
| Perhaps naively, my thought would be that if you want to sell
| hardware and not software, an excellent consumer-grade and
| consumer-priced camera platform with an open hardware
| interface and a decent reference implementation would
| actually find a lot of uses on embedded (i.e. probably Linux)
| platforms.
| viraptor wrote:
| When you write drivers there's no such thing as portable
| code. You need to target different APIs, different
| environment assumptions, etc. Sure, there's some common
| core most likely, but I think this rant is misplaced when
| talking about a hardware company.
|
| The software postprocessing is a different question and
| could be more common... But you're still specialising it
| for DX / v4l2+gui / whatever macos uses. That said... I'd
| kill for an independent library for video processing that
| specialises in camera outputs - beyond different profiles,
| there's no technical reason that couldn't be used
| independently of hardware.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Maybe in 2002, but it's a USB webcam in 2022, if you're
| writing your own drivers from scratch on any platform
| rather than using the standards-compliant ones, I'd first
| wonder if you haven't got a case of NIH syndrome rather
| than an actual case of being constrained by the
| standards.
|
| But maybe they genuinely cannot use standard protocols
| for some reason, then sure, writing a Linux driver might
| not be worth it.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't really get this. Linux has had the same problem
| with audio interfaces, and you know what the solution was?
| Class-compliant USB peripherals. That's probably what
| people are asking for here: nobody wants to install
| additional software to make their webcam work, so why can't
| the processing be done on-device (especially if they're
| charging $200!).
| firebaze wrote:
| Could you tl'dr? My naive reading of your comment doesn't
| help.
| nmstoker wrote:
| How heavily simplified do you need it?
|
| Doesn't seem that hard to follow (nor an especially long
| read worthy of shortening) but everyone's different.
| LeFantome wrote:
| If there are selling undifferentiated hardware supported by
| smart / magic software, they need to block people from
| running their fancy software on somebody else's cheap
| hardware.
|
| If they want to get paid for the magic, it will be more
| expensive to buy hardware from them than it is to buy
| equivalent hardware elsewhere. How do they get you to buy
| their product?
| j-krieger wrote:
| You failed to mention that your webcam is a whopping _700
| dollars_.
| redfern314 wrote:
| Where do you see that? Their website, plus the linked
| article, say $200.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| As I see it's only $200[1]
|
| [1]: https://getlumina.com/
| jacooper wrote:
| What the hell, Who wants a 700$ Webcam ? You can just buy an
| iPhone at that point.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| This is wild. What, how is this justifiable, why would anyone
| pay that amount when you can get an old DSLR and produce
| amazing quality video with some tinkering, or get Logi
| Streamcam or similar for as good quality.
| Stampo00 wrote:
| Although this was a fascinating article, the quality of webcams
| is pretty low on my list of things that could use improvement in
| the teleconferencing experience.
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