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Webcams aren't good enough

• axiomdata316 4y ago
  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.
• kcb 4y ago
  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-Microphones/dp/B01DPNPJ72 https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
        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)
        • nephanth 4y ago
          On linux you may be able to set it up with fmpeg and v4l2loopback (create a v4l2loopback device and have ffmpeg grab your input, crop it, and output to that device). Maybe less overkill, but probably more involved to set up though so OBS is probably your best choice unless it is really too heavy.
    • jpindar 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            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.
          • 4y ago
  • throwyawayyyy 4y ago
    +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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
          • GekkePrutser 4y ago
            Try different lighting. Less warm white.
    • madeofpalk 4y ago
      I care a lot less about resolution, but more about the actual image quality. Noise, color/white balance, detail, etc.
  • Casteil 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Depends on so many factors. How large is the screen? Is use of multiple screens enabled in zoom? Is speaker mode enabled?
      • sagarm 4y ago
        Big meetings are the most worthless meetings anyway. It's 1:1s or three person meetings I find most productive, and where I care more about video quality.
    • daveoc64 4y ago
      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-Group-HD-video 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!
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
    > "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 4y ago
      specially if the "bad" pixels are noise that consume most of the bitrate without carrying information.
  • wyager 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    > 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.
  • IshKebab 4y ago
    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.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      Audio is very important, but I have no idea what would make a good microphone, everyone seems to have a different opinion on what constitutes ‘great’.
      • IshKebab 4y ago
        You can just record yourself in Audacity. We're not talking recording studio grade here. It's pretty obvious what is good and what isn't.
    • imhoguy 4y ago
      Zoom is the test of connection itself. The way it handles choppy link with slowdown then speedup technique to mask the issues, balances audio over video priority etc, just amazes me. One of the best videoconf software I used since 1990s which works in really shitty conditions (remote LTE, HSDPA).
      • IshKebab 4y ago
        Yeah I agree the sped up audio technique is clever. But I don't know what you mean by "Zoom is the test of connection itself". The only indication it gives you that people can't hear you is a "Your internet connection is unstable" warning and that doesn't really tell you much.
        • imhoguy 4y ago
  • dopa42365 4y ago
    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 30€ Behringer sounds much better than whatever it is most people use).
  • GekkePrutser 4y ago
    But compression looks so much better when it has decent source material to work with. It's the crappy noisy stuff it screws up on because it views the noise as detail and tries to preserve it, at the expense of details you do actually care about. This is why movies still look really good even at surprisingly low bitrates (well one of the reasons, the other is of course unlimited time and lots of budget for tuning the compression which realtime applications don't have)
  • jonahhorowitz 4y ago
    Agreed. I set up a really nice webcam by using a Mirrorless Full Frame camera and my wife refuses to use it when she sits at my desk. She doesn't want her coworkers to see her with that much detail and clarity. By the way, just using a Sony or Panasonic mirrorless is fine, you don't need to buy a custom high-end webcam, and you can use those for taking pictures and videos when you're out on the weekend.
  • animesh 4y ago
    Another +1. I got a HP w100 480P 30 FPS for this purpose. It serves my purpose best which is interviews and screen shares with friends. I can be seen and recognized and save on bandwich.
• standardUser 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        I think they meant to buy an extra android phone and use that as a webcam.
        • LAC-Tech 4y ago
          I guess I don't understand the mechanism where by you use an android phone as an external webcam. Guess I never tried just plugging it in via usb and seeing if my OS picked it up...
          • 2gremlin181 4y ago
            There are quite a few apps that let you easily do that. I use DroidCam which let's you do it over your local network as well, reducing the cables running to your PC.
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  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.
• gedy 4y ago
  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.
• gumby 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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-isight-camera-with-m1-mac 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 4y ago
    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 https://github.com/maxbbraun/pisight
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    > 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.)
    • pkamb 4y ago
      Mainly for the external case design, which is still top-notch. http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-isight 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.
    • 4y ago
• navanchauhan 4y ago
  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-webcam-mac-continuity-camera-macos-wwdc https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/6/23156834/apple-iphone-webc... [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10018/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10018/
  • feet 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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.
      • OJFord 4y ago
        Why does that mean 'always'? i.e. rephrase GP you quoted: 'just use a lot bigger of a cam in the laptop'.
        • deleted 4y ago
• zf00002 4y ago
  Dash cams, even the higher end ones, have the same image quality problems.
• pintxo 4y ago
  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/self-help-center/eos-webcam-utility/ 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.
  • nextos 4y ago
    Would it not overheat after some time?
    • draw_down 4y ago
      Yes, that is only one of the hassles with this approach. When it works it does look great however.
    • pintxo 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      Not in my experience. I'm curious why you would you expect it to overheat?
      • nextos 4y ago
        Some cameras are not designed to record HD video during long periods of time.
        • 4y ago
• thecybernerd 4y ago
  When will 4K HDR video conferencing or even 1080p SDR become the norm? 3 years out? 5 years?
  • TheRealPomax 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• bradknowles 4y ago
  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!
  • oxfeed65261 4y ago
    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.
    • bradknowles 4y ago
      The entire reason why I dumped my iPhone 7 is that it can't keep up with the current version of iOS, and I needed something that could. So, I'd always be stuck on a device with a back rev version of iOS, and after a short while, security patches would stop being back ported. Moreover, my employer requires that I use a device that is running the latest version of iOS and is fully patched, so the iPhone 7 is now simply a non-starter. As for using it as a webcam, the camera and other hardware is old enough that I don't think I'd like it for that use, either. So, it'll sit in a closet or on a shelf until I decide what to do with it, along with all the other old iPhones I have, going all the way back to the original iPhone.
  • gnabgib 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460
• asojfdowgh 4y ago
  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?
• xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  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.
  • birdyrooster 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• josefrichter 4y ago
  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.
  • drdec 4y ago
    Care to share the results of your research?
  • alar44 4y ago
    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.
• andai 4y ago
  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).
• post_break 4y ago
  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.
  • __turbobrew__ 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      "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.
  • graupel 4y ago
    https://github.com/Itaybre/CameraController 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!
    • post_break 4y ago
      Oh man I'm gonna try this tomorrow at work. This looks promising. Thank you.
• mcovalt 4y ago
  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 https://github.com/Itaybre/CameraController
• _boffin_ 4y ago
  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.
  • probably_wrong 4y ago
    > 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.
  • traviswt 4y ago
    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.
  • dagmx 4y ago
    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.
  • standardUser 4y ago
    It matters a lot for adult camming, or any camming where the physical appearance is part of the appeal.
  • 4y ago
• logifail 4y ago
  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
  • jjeaff 4y ago
    Or, just turning on any bright lights will do wonders. Most people have very dim lighting.
    • logifail 4y ago
      > 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.
      • ec109685 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 20€ 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.
• paulgerhardt 4y ago
  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 https://ma.tt/2020/05/ceo-video-streaming [2] https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/ https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
  • krono 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• vehemenz 4y ago
  Camo is fine, but is there a third party app that I can just buy without a subscription?
  • brunick 4y ago
    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
  • DHPersonal 4y ago
    You can buy a Camo lifetime license for $80 USD.
    • extra88 4y ago
      Is that a lifetime of upgrades or is it merely a perpetual license that doesn't stop working simply because your subscription ran out?
      • DHPersonal 4y ago
        I am not sure. I looked for an answer but didn't see anything. It appears to behave like a perpetual subscription (meaning free upgrades) but I think you would have to contact the customer support team at the company to get the answers.
      • deleted 4y ago
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• dheera 4y ago
  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/ 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.
• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  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.
• haunter 4y ago
  I use the Elgato EpocCam app with my iPhone 11. Works perfectly with OBS https://www.elgato.com/en/epoccam https://www.elgato.com/en/epoccam
• kkfx 4y ago
  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.
• mnd999 4y ago
  Surely the adult webcam industry has solved this problem?
  • alar44 4y ago
    Yeah, buy a video camera, not a $100 webcam.
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  good audio is better than good video, I don’t care if you look like a potato, I just need clear low-latency audio
• jsdwarf 4y ago
  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?
• captn3m0 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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).
• the_only_law 4y ago
  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.
• fartcannon 4y ago
  We don't need to do video calls. They are superfluous. In fact, most interactions can just be emails.
• tapland 4y ago
  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?
• noxvilleza 4y ago
  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.
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  If Apple can equip their iPhone with such a great webcam, why won't they just put the same camera in MacBook/iMac?
  • jmu1234567890 4y ago
    The lid is too thin
    • qwerty456127 4y ago
      iMac?
      • extra88 4y ago
        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.
  • supreme_berry 4y ago
• sfblah 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    A realsense camera, 2 hours worth of dev and OBS virtual cam and I could make a scattery POC of this :p
• deleted 4y ago
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• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  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.
  • oittaa 4y ago
    > 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.
  • derekdahmer 4y ago
    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.
• 55555 4y ago
  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.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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• dagaci 4y ago
  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
• melony 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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)
• ChuckMcM 4y ago
  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.
• quartz 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Seen a lot of "meh" videos. But Julie Schiro has made a few actually good videos https://m.youtube.com/c/JulieSchiro/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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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.
• rlei 4y ago
  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/Logitech-full-year-Q4-FY22-press-release-FINAL.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/104539020/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/... [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/lumina-ai-webcam-review https://www.windowscentral.com/lumina-ai-webcam-review
  • pryelluw 4y ago
    Whats the privacy factor like? Does the camera software phone home? Do you track users ?
  • hgomersall 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Same.
• mdavis6890 4y ago
  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.
• thewebcount 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    He is quite clear: he is changing the lights in the room.
    • thewebcount 4y ago
      OK, fair enough. Point being that the exposure of his face never changes, but the exposure of other things in the frame does. That’s pretty bizarre, especially given that his face is overexposed.
• indymike 4y ago
  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.
• knorker 4y ago
  This is from 2021 by a good margin. Anything new since i last read it, or should this have 2021 in the title?
• zeristor 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• wilg 4y ago
  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/ https://opalcamera.com/
  • oats 4y ago
    Wait, that /only/ works on MacOS?
  • klinquist 4y ago
    What don't you love about it? (I've got one on order)
    • codyogden 4y ago
      All of the primary reasons I purchased are great. Only a couple snags: the cord was way too short if you don't have a compatible port on the back of your desktop monitor, and the camera gets warm and stays warm. Too warm. The software runs constantly in the background. The camera runs warm when it's in use (I expected this), but it also stays warm and "doing something" despite not being active when I put my Mac to sleep (screens off). Unless I unplug it, the C1 stays warm as if it's engaged and running. I reached out to their team, and they said "just unplug it when you're not using it." Being forced to unplug it kind of defeats the purpose of having a high quality desktop camera set up. Opal's team promised a fix for this in a software update, but I've had it for three months and have received zero software updates (though I noticed they have done alpha test releases). None of these have come to GA to the point that the subreddit routinely asks if the company is still going. Overall, I really like the camera. Howe ver, Opal as a company certainly has reason to get more active and deliver quality if they expect us to start paying a subscription for the software.
• zeristor 4y ago
  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.
• brandoncarl 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
    • brandoncarl 4y ago
      I used this for the camera angle. Works really well. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F1DB2F7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F1DB2F7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... On timing – I just had to start planning a bit better. In worst case I'd start the meeting without video and turn on a minute or two in. Well worth it for me.
• worldmerge 4y ago
  Why can't apple put the iphone rear camera in the MacBook?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • dialogbox 4y ago
    Because it's too thick. Think about why iPhone should have that ugly camera bump. MacBook's display is too thin to have that.
    • worldmerge 4y ago
      Make the display thicker then, like the plastic shell ones of the past.
• kristjansson 4y ago
  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.
• slotrans 4y ago
  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.
• Stampo00 4y ago
  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.
• Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
  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.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  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.
  • xxs 4y ago
    >Laptop mics are a different story, especially with fans on high Switch off your own video - most of the work is video encoding, and unless you have dedicated hardware, it'd suck - sorry, blow hard, the fan that's it.
• mberning 4y ago
  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.
• lousken 4y ago
  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.
• keyle 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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• regularfry 4y ago
  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.
• spsphulse 4y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/8WSB2OtXysU
• chubs 4y ago
  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.
• mjcohen 4y ago
  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.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Webcams don't have to be good because people have low expectations. People with high expectations use DSLRs as webcams.
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  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.
• kimburgess 4y ago
  There are good USB cameras, just not a the price point reviewed here. For personal use (sitting in front of a normal display at a desk), I strongly recommend and use https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/one/ https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/one/. It's a device you likely use every day. Spend the money, get setup once, and move on.
  • DonCullen 4y ago
    Nearly $500. Oof.
• mithrilskeleton 4y ago
  Unfortunately there aren't any FOSS solutions for using an android phone as a webcam.
• GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Yeah I always wonder.. Why don't they put those cams they put in phones in a webcam?? Sure they're expensive but so are some webcams. And $200-300 buys you a great compact photo cam. So why not a webcam that needs less components? It's not even just the sensors, the optics totally suck as well. Even the top webcams often have a huge 'fake lens' that's actually just flat glass and being it is just the usual tiny lens. The logitech stream does this, for example. It looks impressive but it's still the same crap in prettier plastic. I kinda had to laugh at that odd iPhone clip they introduced at Apple's last keynote. It's basically an admission that their webcams suck. I know some colleagues that use their phones as cam and while the quality is great it's also super annoying not being able to use your phone when a text comes in or something. I know Apple has some built in tricks to handle that stuff on a Mac but for work I don't always use one (and I don't have an iPhone). So I never use my phone for this. I'd spend 200-300 bucks on a great webcam though. It's just that right now there aren't any.
• stonogo 4y ago
  This article was written from the perspective of someone who has not kept up with the webcam market at all and judging by the current state of the comments here, neither has anyone else. Products like the Dell WB7022 and the Elgato Facecam blow the previous generation out of the water, and the Dell is even microphone-free, which I much prefer to the compromised microphones jammed into most cheap models. The Dell model is also bog-standard UVC compliant, unless you want to play with face-tracking or HDR modes; these for some reason require a Windows program to toggle, instead of being exposed as UVC settings. The Elgato model is entirely proprietary. As much as I like the WB7022, it turns out that nobody notices or cares if I hop on a meeting on my wife's computer with her Logitech c922; at the end of the day and for the majority of business needs the cost/quality cusp has been nailed for about a decade, and I don't predict a major shift toward higher quality any time soon. If you need to produce high-quality video, a webcam will never be enough, and if you don't need to shoot a movie, webcams have been fine for a long time. Even in the linked article, all the criticism is from the owner of the webcams, with strong opinions about photography. Not one iota of attention or interest has been paid to whether anyone on the other end of the meeting even notices.
• bborud 4y ago
  I wish webcam manufacturers would focus on sensors and optics instead of rubbing lipstick all over low quality hardware with an undeniable porcine quality. Fixing it with AI is nonsense. Fashionable nonsense but still nonsense. I have spent lots of money on various webcams. Including cameras that promise “AI”. The truth is not even my $1000 “AI” webcam gets close to my aging iPhone 7. As a video conferencing camera it is an over-priced, over hyped-piece of junk. The damn thing can’t even do basic white balance and has no control to set it because “it is an AI camera”. I either look like I’m about to die or as if I have a sunburn. And after countless firmware upgrades, it is still horrible. The expensive camera has one thing going for it though: it has decent microphones. That’s actually more important than good video. To anyone who makes AI webcams: please give me manual controls and focus on image quality instead of marketing. Don’t be clever. Hire someone who obsesses over image quality and is a decent photographer to judge the visuals. And put a good microphone system in the thing.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    Totally with you on the microphones. I use a really decent mic for video calls now, and everyone says I sound like an NPR announcer. This is a good thing. It's really draining to try and listen to people who have awful sound quality when they're talking. I wish everyone would invest in a decent mic. Just a basic podcast mic is a million times better than using your earpods or something similar.
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    Is there any way to use an old iphone as a webcam setup? imagine additionally could do Home control etc
    • loeg 4y ago
      That’s the marketing pitch of the article.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• harry8 4y ago
  >The Razer and Adwaita webcams offer no settings *On mac. Kiyo has settings on windows. I had a lot more luck setting up on a windows laptop then using on Mac & separately on linux. The ring light is dimmable and i won't post them, but i think my selfies look better than his. Zero affiliation with any vendor and it shits me to tears razer do windows only settings and razor's whole software experience it's something I dislike intensely. It's a reasonable option for your consideration along with a blue yeti mic for a Linux based home Office setup where you look ok, your voice sounds sound clear and the money isn't as bad as it could be.
• stevage 4y ago
  Question for people using Came: isn't it annoying having your phone locked up for the whole video call? No way to even check your notifications or do anything else on it? And constantly having to plug and unplug it, adding more wear to the delicate USB C sensor? Or do you use an old phone for Camo instead?
  • WatchDog 4y ago
    I would find it really annoying yes. I used camo with a spare iphone that has a broken screen. Despite being quite happy with the image quality results, I found that the experience was frustrating enough that I don't bother using it anymore, even without tying up my main phone. Every time you want to use it, you need to turn on the phone, open the app, plug it into your laptop, and make sure it's sitting in the stand properly. It's just a bit too much friction for me to bother with it for day to day zoom calls.
• erickhill 4y ago
  Unrelated, you (the article's author) have a seriously gorgeous mane of hair.
  • sydthrowaway 4y ago
    What supplements help for this?
    • erickhill 4y ago
      I've read Vitamin D can help thicken existing hair. It supposedly is good in stimulating new and old hair follicles. When there isn't enough vitamin D in your system, new hair growth can be stunted. (Or so I've read.)
• benreesman 4y ago
  I briefly worked with a guy whose previous startup had been premised on the idea of combining several consumer-grade phone-cameras into a small array and using software to build a far better image than any one of the cameras could accomplish individually, yet remain cost effective because these things are sold in such absurd scale. I don't know what became of it, but it sounded plausible (at least the computer vision parts that I understood were sane-sounding). Does anyone know if people are doing this sort of thing? (I'm aware that the expensive iPhones have more than one camera but IIUC that's for different reasons).
• ijuz 4y ago
  A nice device is the Nexigo N970p, it is expensive with about $200, but the good part is that is has very good quality and comes with a remote. All settings are made in an OSD and are stored on the Webcam. It just works, not software drivers or anything is needed. Only downside is the power draw, it is quite warm. It seems to suck so much power that the USB plug next to it in a dell docking station was not working correctly.
• mezzman 4y ago
  Marshall, a company that makes miniature video cameras used in broadcast has a great USB camera that is UVC1.5 compliant, you can change lenses, it's not that big, and has great image quality. https://marshall-usa.com/cameras/CV503-U3/ https://marshall-usa.com/cameras/CV503-U3/
  • post_break 4y ago
    It's also $400. I was excited until I saw the price.
  • roughly 4y ago
    That looks great, but I do think I’ve just discovered my price ceiling for caring about how I look on Zoom calls.
• shaggie76 4y ago
  One criticism I haven't seen brought up is that while UVC drivers are plug and play on Windows their settings are not persistent across reboots [1]. I would painstakingly manually tune the exposure and white balance of my Brio and get it to be less than terrible and then windows update would reboot over night and I'd fire up a stream in the morning looking purple. I have softboxes and high-CRI lights too so this was particularly enraging. The flipside is non-UVC driver are less terrible but less compatible: I've switched to an Avermedia PW513 which uses their own drivers -- this works great for OBS when I stream but nothing that uses UVC works without using an OBS Virtual Cam. Just don't run process monitor and watch what their software is doing to your registry every second. So the driver system, at least on windows, is part of the problem IMO. [1] After I switched to non-UVC I learned about a UVC driver restoring utility but I've never tried it.
• Arn_Thor 4y ago
  I have been testing various solutions for semi-professional-looking interviews with remote staff and concluded that a dedicated microphone plus the rear-facing camera of whatever smartphone they have at home is by far the best bang for the buck solution. webcams are too terrible and mirrorless/dslr cameras are too expensive and complicated to set up and use.
• mattacular 4y ago
  The webcam in the MacBook Pro seems to be way better than most. Complementing that is an extremely good mic. Arguably these are two of the truly "professional" touches in their line as of late.
  • loeg 4y ago
    The webcam and mic in the 2019 MBP I have are decidedly mediocre. Maybe they’ve improved recently?
• twobitshifter 4y ago
  I have an odd webcam given by our company. When I plugged it in, I thought something was badly broken - it was just a giant blur. Messing around with the thing, I noticed my hand came in focus. Turns out that I had to manually adjust a ring around the camera to focus. Once I did that, the quality is crisp and clear, and I’m not moving closer and farther away from my desk, so I can see how autofocus isn’t needed. I think the simplicity of the design may actually be helping the quality in this case.
• corytheboyd 4y ago
  I would pay good money for a solid dedicated camera for video calls. I know I can just use my phone, but I'm one of those weird people who only has one iPhone and it's really annoying to have to undo my camera rig every time I need a 2FA code. I would happily spend hundreds of dollars if the product was good.
  • nthnclrk 4y ago
    Opal C1
• kjgkjhfkjf 4y ago
  I don't need to see every pore in my coworkers' skin when I meet with them over Zoom. The regular (company issued) MBP camera is fine.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  It depends on what good enough means. For meetings, a cheap Razr webcam is good enough for me. If I would need a high quality video, I would use a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
• notoriousjpg 4y ago
  Before you look at buying a new webcam, look at just using DroidCam with an old Android.
• numpad0 4y ago
  Are webcams not good enough, or are larger CMOS sensors locked up into dSLR and dSLR sucks? The situation feels that way to me.
• acd 4y ago
  Alternative: Elgato camlink hdmi capture interface with a used Sony A6000 system camera is one way to het better quality. Its about sensor size and optics. A mirrorless system camera has for example APS-C sensor which captures much more light than a typical web cam sensor. Gphoto2 camera to webcam capture tool if you are runnning Linux. Then you can turn system cameras into webcam given the right camera model.
  • diffeomorphism 4y ago
    From a quick look that is about 500€? (100 for the capture and about 400 for the cam on ebay). Also, you probably still want a stand, battery, lighting, microphone... That is at least 5 times as expensive as a webcam. Is it at least 5 times as good? If you already have a system camera, that might be a good alternative, but otherwise?
• Netcob 4y ago
  I'd love to just use an old smartphone as my webcam, but unfortunately they really aren't made to be connected to a charger 24/7. If they at least let you charge the battery to 80% and then shut off the battery until the next cycle, or power on with no battery present, this would be a great alternative. I got a OnePlus 6T here that I'm not using anymore, the camera is great, but I think if I tried using it as a webcam I'd just end up watching the battery balloon through the case (or worse).
• YarickR2 4y ago
  Well, there's Polycom , and their pro/business solutions were delivering an exceptional results back before Zoom . Idk about their current product line, though
• Jaruzel 4y ago
  Two points I feel I have to make here: 1. If you absolutely need the best quality image you can have on a video call, use a mirrorless or DSLR photo camera that has 'clean HDMI out' and couple it with a HDMI capture device (which are now quite cheap for 1080p capture). 2. Most (if not all) video conferencing software applies heavy compression to the image of your video feed. Even if your local preview image shows you in ultra-sharp focus with fine detail, you can almost guarantee that people at the other end are seeing a soft fuzzy picture that looks like it's been upscaled from 240p. So you have to ask yourself, is my laptop webcam, or the £50 no-name USB camera 'good enough'? - in most cases, the answer is probably 'yes'.
• bodge5000 4y ago
  Honestly if I were to buy another webcam beyond the cheapest "yeh that'll do" one I could find, the main thing I'd be looking for is microphone quality and features. Sure, I could and have brought a USB mic, but a webcam is pointed directly at you (like a shotgun mic, which seems ideal for this kind of thing), whereas the bulk of a USB mic can be harder to position in a way that doesn't block your forward monitor. If it had a configurable mute shortcut, with a little light on it to show its mute status, I'd buy one in a second. In fact, saying all that I don't even think what I want is a webcam, I want a USB webcam-mounted microphone. I do remember seeing one once, but its very old now and has none of that mute functionality. Wish someone would make one again
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  There’s a bunch of advice on improving video calls here: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/ https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/ It touches on webcams. Some other important things for video calls apart from webcam picture quality are: - latency. This matters everywhere (webcam, webcam driver, codecs, network, graphics pipeline, monitor software, physically switching the pixels) but I would expect webcams to introduce higher latency due to generally not being good - audio matters a lot (as does audio latency and slowing down audio to synchronise it with slow video) - some lighting things - to some extent eye contact will also be wrong with a webcam so maybe the FaceTime style thing where your eyes are ‘corrected’ to appear to be looking at the camera instead of your screen would help
  • jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Yes, if you do a lot of business communication, this stuff is important. I talk to way too many people that should know better that clearly don't have a clue about any of this and that end up looking and sounding pretty poorly It's pretty simple. Most bluetooth headsets are not great, including the expensive ones that Apple sells you. And even if they are good, the bluetooth audio compression is pretty bad. So, you are unlikely to sound very clear. So, avoid that and use wired headsets or even your laptop's build in microphone instead. For optimal results, invest in a good microphone. There's a reason professional podcast hosts sound so good: they use proper microphones. You can sound that good as well. A simple, wired clip on microphone doesn't cost a fortune. Audio filtering is pretty aggressive these days and that can cause additional issues. For example eliminating feedback and echoes is something that a lot of software tries that can result in your audio cutting out and getting distorted. Solution: wear headphones to listen to the sound. This prevents feedback from having to be filtered out. Also, being in a quiet environment helps. As the article notes, many webcams are not great in terms of hardware. In practical terms this means low resolution sensors that will have a lot of noise. The darker it gets, the worse it gets. So be in a well lit room and pay some attention to the light situation. A simple desk light turned the right way can do wonders at night. Professional youtubers tend to invest in special lights for a reason: it makes things look good. Obviously, you need a stable network connection. Doing multiple video calls on a domestic wifi that has multiple family members doing whatever in a room that is around 10 meters from the base station is probably going to result in a pretty bad connection. A few meters can make all the difference. And if you are upload constrained (like many DSL connections are), there are going to be issues. If it's really bad, turn off your video. You'll sound better that way and people will be able to understand you at least. Finally, pay attention to where the camera is pointing. If you are a sales person that spends a lot of money on their outfit, do you really want the lasting impression to make to be your nostrils filmed from below? Also, clean the room you are in and don't have a backdrop of your domestic crap, laundry, and worse. It just does not look professional to do that. It's not hard but you need to pay some attention. If it's really bad, you can use a fake backdrop or blur it. But be aware that that can look a bit glitchy on the other side. Better to just be in a nice looking place. Also nice for yourself BTW.
• karlkloss 4y ago
  Even worse (for me), is the fact that there aren't any decent and affordable microscope/desktop cameras for home/semiprofessional use. Unless you shell out a few thousand dollars, you get the same crappy camera modules that webcams use.
• illiac786 4y ago
  I recommend testing the Webex Desk camera. If you're a company you can get a significant discount (my company gets ~60% discount afaik). https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaboration/datasheet-c78-744525.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborat...
• wernerb 4y ago
  Even if i hook up a great camera, chrome/Firefox's webrtc will squeeze my bitrate and lower res to 720p. There is no way from the client to upgrade basic quality for Meet/Teams/Zoom web apps.
• herbst 4y ago
  I am using my phone and Ip Webcam so I can compress the stream directly from my phone and use the compressed stream on my computer as native webcam input via vl4c (or whatever the kernel module is called) This way I get high quality and high frame rate in a manageable format and my computer can focus on streaming, while my phone does what it was (also) built for, providing a quality video feed.
• Pakdef 4y ago
  The only thing I would like more out of my 10 year old webcam is better night vision...
• randomly123 4y ago
  In the presence of in built webcams - peoples desire to pay for external webcams has reduced.
• hbossy 4y ago
  I don't _want_ a good webcam. There's really no need for my colleagues to be able to count freckles on my nose. All I want others to see is my general contour and expression on my face. In fact I wouldn't use it at all if it weren't mandated by company policy and no one used one until after HR drones started complaining about it. We had one guy join the weekly call with some crystal-clear, HD cam once and entire office started joking about his alleged "online side gig".
• erellsworth 4y ago
  Not good enough for what? All the problems the author describes are certainly issues I'd worry about in photography, but that's not the purpose of a webcam. The quality of images produced by modern webcams rivals that of professional gear from 20 years ago. I'd say that's more than "good enough." And if you really want professional photography quality images from your webcam, it is possible to use a DSLR as a webcam.
• swlkr 4y ago
  So true. I ran into this problem when streaming on twitch. After I switched from a webcam to a sony a7r2, I never looked back. I even use it for zoom calls too, because why not?
• Tepix 4y ago
  Panasonic released a "beta webcam" software for several of their more recent cameras in September 2020[1]. Luckily i have one of the supported models. Unfortunately, it has bugs, it doesn't support Apple Silicon and it hasn't received an update since. Hello Panasonic... please fix the issues and release an update, including Apple M1/M2 support! [1] https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/lumix_webcam_software.html https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/lumix_webcam...
• mcc1ane 4y ago
  Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460
• skewbone 4y ago
  There is an industry that packages high quality Sony image sensors in packages with C or Cs mount lense compatibility and native UVC support on Linux/MacOS/Windows. Primary uses seem to be industrial cameras for manufacturing quality inspections, circuit magnification for repairs, installation onto telescopes, etc. Prices range from $40 to multiple hundreds for extremely high quality sensors. This sketchy site has comparisons of the sensors by area and signal to noise ratio. https://navinside.ru/tablitsa-sravneniya-sony-snr1s/ https://navinside.ru/tablitsa-sravneniya-sony-snr1s/ I bought a 1080P one with very high SNR and 2-14mm lens using the Sony IMX291 sensor for $79. Arducam 1080P USB Webcam,... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0991XRFXB?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0991XRFXB?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar... For audio, I bought a Samson Q2U USB/XLR mic for $60. USB has been perfect, and the included stand works fine to the side of my keyboard. Samson Technologies Q2U USB/XLR... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001R747SG?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001R747SG?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar... Altogether, this is a cost effective way to increase audio and video quality for meetings / streaming.
• badkarma1963 4y ago
  I didn’t see any mention of an important one for me. Size. Many of the higher quality webcams are massive. I actually had to buy a shitty webcam to find one that was a size I was happy with. I take my desk aesthetic really serious to me so that was a big reason I returned all my webcams.
• magicroot75 4y ago
  I wish I could use Camo. But my company doesn't allow third party software without admin approval. Makes the process of installing Camo substantially more obnoxious.