Well a large part of that is because the low light performance on all these webcams is stuck in the early 2000's. So, if you feed them some extra light the imag

Well a large part of that is because the low light performance on all these webcams is stuck in the early 2000's. So, if you feed them some extra light the image quality gets a lot better. OTOH, take a 10 year old DSLR, flip it to video mode and compare the results when you don't have the lights amped up to max. Webcams are one of those areas where 7-8 years ago I was wondering why all the webcams were still USB2. For something like video you _REALLY_ want the extra bandwidth. Sure lots of peoples home connections aren't going to be able to feed the 250Mbit or so that is possible with a USB2 webcam, but in many cases your GPU/etc is probably much more capable of doing a good job with a random codec than whatever $.50c codec happens to be integrated on the webcam itself. So run a reasonable bandwidth to the PC and let it cleanup/compress the image. Rather than having the camera compress it to mpeg2, drop 1/2 the clarity, then have your PC decompress it and re-compress it with a more modern codec.