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> 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 Lumi

> 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 4y ago
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.
adrusi 4y ago
Smartphone cameras are small and far better sensors than what you get in webcams. They rely on software to produce images of the quality we're used to seeing, especially with less-than-ideal lighting, but the lenses and sensor are still far better than the Logitech C920. A webcam doesn't need the latest and greatest video hardware. Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  This is the answer. Camera and processor from a several-year-old smart phone, which is now quite cheap. Sell it for $500. So far no one has, there must be a reason no one can.
  - sephamorr 4y ago
    Ironically, the Apple Studio Display has a A13 processor inside it for camera and other processing. Misses your $500 price point by a long way though!
    - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
      The Studio Display does have a 27" 5K P3-color monitor attached to it, which drives up the price a bit... Seriously, though, in the context of webcams, the Studio Display is kind of a counterpoint to "just rip a camera module out of a few-year-old smartphone and it'll be terrific". That's pretty much what Apple did here, and it's rather notoriously, ah, not great. (I have one, and I think it's better than some people give it credit for, but I know I'm comparing it to Apple's laptop webcams, which have historically been pretty terrible.)
      - Miraste 4y ago
        Sadly, Apple's laptop webcams are still way better than the ones in competitors. I used an HP Spectre from 2020 or so and it had literally the worst digital camera I have ever seen, including the 90s. It's pinhole sized, and it made a brightly lit room look like a closet at midnight while being grainier than off-brand film. They might as well not have bothered.
  - vjerancrnjak 4y ago
    I always wondered how IMX377EQH5 sucked in some devices and was incredible in others (Nexus 5X has really good video/picture quality). Some devices use it for 4K video and it looks like upscaled 480p. Yet 1080p on Nexus 5X looks very sharp.
    - 4y ago
- newsclues 4y ago
  The physics of optics are still a hard problem and laptop screens have less room which is why the suck.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    True but this argument doesn't work for desktop webcams which have as much space as they want (even a lot more than in a phone)
  - bborud 4y ago
    ...and yet, my macbook pro camera produces a better image than my external webcam even though it is lower resolution.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      You probably have a 1080p which required a notch in the screen to make room. The 720p Mac webcams do not look as good as a Logitech 920 or 922.
      - bborud 4y ago
        Resolution is just one factor. What processing you do to an image can easily make a lower resolution image look better than a high resolution image with horrible colors, bad contrast, poor tone curves etc. I'd describe the output on Macs as "unoffensive". It isn't great, but it also isn't bad. Most people who dabble in photography and shoot raw will have some idea of this. The (untreated) images that come out of my professional DSLR don't look as pleasant as those that come out of my iPhone. Even if they have 4 times the pixels, and each pixel has much more dynamic range. How the raw sensor input is interpreted, influenced by intent, and then rendered, can be the difference between something you would hang on your wall and something you'd delete. I have half a dozen macs with cameras, including the 16" notched M1 Mac Pro. None of them produce a great image, but they won't stand out as bad in a video conference. My $1000 camera does stand out because of its poor image processing, especially in low light conditions. It is a bit sharper, but the colors look distinctly off.
    - 4y ago
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, I agreed with the cynical view of GP until I read this comment. A very convincing defense of the prioritization of the software layer.
- modeless 4y ago
  > Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today. Sorry, that's exactly the strategy of these webcam startups, and Apple with the Studio Display, and the results empirically suck. Even if you could get 2017 smartphone quality (which is still apparently an unsolved problem), why should you settle for that in a webcam that doesn't need to fit in your pocket or run on a tiny battery or cost a tiny fraction of the BOM of a much more complex device? We should be doing way better than that. And way better is definitely possible.
  - blablabla123 4y ago
    As stated somewhere else, at the end the video will go through very lossful compression and often be scaled down when used at work. I mean I'm now at my 4th webcam since the pandemic started because the other cams were: too dark, constantly zooming in and out for no reason (MS Cinema Lifecam), poor image. I now sticked with the Logitech C920 because I can manually set brightness/contrast/activate autofocus. I think that understates how bad the current state of webcams really is. Esp. when you move around a lot while talking/there's an unusual light situation. IMHO first these core problems need to be solved (and then of course it'd be great be build upon that)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - modeless 4y ago
      Bigger sensors and bigger lenses are exactly what would solve those core problems. Even after video call compression (which is not always extreme) it is trivial to tell whether a video was taken with a big sensor/lens or a small one. Compression is no reason to use a crappy camera. Garbage in, garbage out.
dharma1 4y ago
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/remote camera control into iOS and come up with a nice attachment for the phone that works with MacBooks and displays so you don’t have to look at the camera at a weird angle. Maybe some magsafe sticker behind the display so you can snap your phone to the back of the display easily, with the main rear cameras pointing at you above the display
- adrusi 4y ago
  They announced just this at WWDC a couple weeks ago.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Link?
    - simondotau 4y ago
      The feature is called “Continuity Camera”.
      - sjs7007 4y ago
        Welp, that feature is basically going to kill this company then.
      - drewg123 4y ago
        This appears to support just photos and document scanning. And also seems to use BT and WiFi. I have a friend who lives in a high rise with incredibly crowded wifi spectrum. Anything wireless that involves latency sucks in their apartment. They tried to use an old iPhone for VC, but the jitter added by their crappy wifi made that a non-starter. By contrast, this product uses a USB connection, and I'm guessing would perform far better for them (and really anybody with crappy wifi, which is most people).
harha 4y ago
Agree, the flat and tiny webcams aren’t really necessary at home or in the home office and I don’t know anyone who carries even the smaller webcams around. As long as it doesn’t look too bad, a larger lens and sensor would be perfectly fine (think of the original iSight camera, something like that would totally be acceptable) and I’d rather not have my computer be slowed down even further by the webcam doing some magic in the background.
Spooky23 4y ago
Agreed. Optics aren’t that hard. If you put a good sensor in something with a form factor similar to the old iSight camera, seems to me like it would be a winner. People seem to have embraced those stupid circle lights everywhere, why is a decent camera a bridge too far?
Guest19023892 4y ago
I agree. It's a little strange to complain about a lack of progress in webcams the past decade, and then ship similar quality hardware to decade old webcams. Why does everyone focus on a small form factor for webcams? Look at the size of microphones being sold today. The Blue Yeti is one of the most popular microphones and it's almost 30cm (12") in height. You might say, if you don't mind a large form factor, then go buy a DSLR or mirrorless camera. The problem there is they're not designed to be webcams. I watched one of the Lumina videos, and they were complaining the $2,000 Sony camera took forever to setup and configure for their demo. That's a problem. Someone solve it. Give me a large high quality camera that is designed to be a webcam first. I have lots of room on my desk, it doesn't need to fit in my pocket.
- achow 4y ago
  ..plus add a good speaker and multiple mic (all available at commodity price).
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  > I watched one of the Lumina videos, and they were complaining the $2,000 Sony camera took forever to setup and configure for their demo Is that even a real problem? I started using my fuji mirrorless camera as a webcam during the pandemic and it was almost trivial to setup. All I needed to do was download some official software, plug the camera in and switch it on for it to start working as a webcam.
  - underlines 4y ago
    Same here: Used my Sony A7III with USB and their software as an excellent webcam and since I bought the new Sony A7IV, all my client always ask in video calls, what Webcam that is. At my new employer I had several coworkers asking me how the heck I did the insane background blur. (They didn't know it was a mirrorless) If you have an old DSLR or a modern camera, you can use a 20USD Chinese HDMI Capture stick and get the best webcam on the planet.
    - aksss 4y ago

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago

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.

adrusi 4y ago

Smartphone cameras are small and far better sensors than what you get in webcams. They rely on software to produce images of the quality we're used to seeing, especially with less-than-ideal lighting, but the lenses and sensor are still far better than the Logitech C920. A webcam doesn't need the latest and greatest video hardware. Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today.

kylecordes 4y ago
This is the answer. Camera and processor from a several-year-old smart phone, which is now quite cheap. Sell it for $500. So far no one has, there must be a reason no one can.
- sephamorr 4y ago
  Ironically, the Apple Studio Display has a A13 processor inside it for camera and other processing. Misses your $500 price point by a long way though!
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    The Studio Display does have a 27" 5K P3-color monitor attached to it, which drives up the price a bit... Seriously, though, in the context of webcams, the Studio Display is kind of a counterpoint to "just rip a camera module out of a few-year-old smartphone and it'll be terrific". That's pretty much what Apple did here, and it's rather notoriously, ah, not great. (I have one, and I think it's better than some people give it credit for, but I know I'm comparing it to Apple's laptop webcams, which have historically been pretty terrible.)
    - Miraste 4y ago
      Sadly, Apple's laptop webcams are still way better than the ones in competitors. I used an HP Spectre from 2020 or so and it had literally the worst digital camera I have ever seen, including the 90s. It's pinhole sized, and it made a brightly lit room look like a closet at midnight while being grainier than off-brand film. They might as well not have bothered.
- vjerancrnjak 4y ago
  I always wondered how IMX377EQH5 sucked in some devices and was incredible in others (Nexus 5X has really good video/picture quality). Some devices use it for 4K video and it looks like upscaled 480p. Yet 1080p on Nexus 5X looks very sharp.
  - 4y ago
newsclues 4y ago
The physics of optics are still a hard problem and laptop screens have less room which is why the suck.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  True but this argument doesn't work for desktop webcams which have as much space as they want (even a lot more than in a phone)
- bborud 4y ago
  ...and yet, my macbook pro camera produces a better image than my external webcam even though it is lower resolution.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    You probably have a 1080p which required a notch in the screen to make room. The 720p Mac webcams do not look as good as a Logitech 920 or 922.
    - bborud 4y ago
      Resolution is just one factor. What processing you do to an image can easily make a lower resolution image look better than a high resolution image with horrible colors, bad contrast, poor tone curves etc. I'd describe the output on Macs as "unoffensive". It isn't great, but it also isn't bad. Most people who dabble in photography and shoot raw will have some idea of this. The (untreated) images that come out of my professional DSLR don't look as pleasant as those that come out of my iPhone. Even if they have 4 times the pixels, and each pixel has much more dynamic range. How the raw sensor input is interpreted, influenced by intent, and then rendered, can be the difference between something you would hang on your wall and something you'd delete. I have half a dozen macs with cameras, including the 16" notched M1 Mac Pro. None of them produce a great image, but they won't stand out as bad in a video conference. My $1000 camera does stand out because of its poor image processing, especially in low light conditions. It is a bit sharper, but the colors look distinctly off.
  - 4y ago
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I agreed with the cynical view of GP until I read this comment. A very convincing defense of the prioritization of the software layer.
modeless 4y ago
> Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today. Sorry, that's exactly the strategy of these webcam startups, and Apple with the Studio Display, and the results empirically suck. Even if you could get 2017 smartphone quality (which is still apparently an unsolved problem), why should you settle for that in a webcam that doesn't need to fit in your pocket or run on a tiny battery or cost a tiny fraction of the BOM of a much more complex device? We should be doing way better than that. And way better is definitely possible.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  As stated somewhere else, at the end the video will go through very lossful compression and often be scaled down when used at work. I mean I'm now at my 4th webcam since the pandemic started because the other cams were: too dark, constantly zooming in and out for no reason (MS Cinema Lifecam), poor image. I now sticked with the Logitech C920 because I can manually set brightness/contrast/activate autofocus. I think that understates how bad the current state of webcams really is. Esp. when you move around a lot while talking/there's an unusual light situation. IMHO first these core problems need to be solved (and then of course it'd be great be build upon that)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - modeless 4y ago
    Bigger sensors and bigger lenses are exactly what would solve those core problems. Even after video call compression (which is not always extreme) it is trivial to tell whether a video was taken with a big sensor/lens or a small one. Compression is no reason to use a crappy camera. Garbage in, garbage out.

dharma1 4y ago

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/remote camera control into iOS and come up with a nice attachment for the phone that works with MacBooks and displays so you don’t have to look at the camera at a weird angle. Maybe some magsafe sticker behind the display so you can snap your phone to the back of the display easily, with the main rear cameras pointing at you above the display

adrusi 4y ago
They announced just this at WWDC a couple weeks ago.
- p1esk 4y ago
  Link?
  - simondotau 4y ago
    The feature is called “Continuity Camera”.
    - sjs7007 4y ago
      Welp, that feature is basically going to kill this company then.
    - drewg123 4y ago
      This appears to support just photos and document scanning. And also seems to use BT and WiFi. I have a friend who lives in a high rise with incredibly crowded wifi spectrum. Anything wireless that involves latency sucks in their apartment. They tried to use an old iPhone for VC, but the jitter added by their crappy wifi made that a non-starter. By contrast, this product uses a USB connection, and I'm guessing would perform far better for them (and really anybody with crappy wifi, which is most people).

harha 4y ago

Agree, the flat and tiny webcams aren’t really necessary at home or in the home office and I don’t know anyone who carries even the smaller webcams around. As long as it doesn’t look too bad, a larger lens and sensor would be perfectly fine (think of the original iSight camera, something like that would totally be acceptable) and I’d rather not have my computer be slowed down even further by the webcam doing some magic in the background.

Spooky23 4y ago

Agreed. Optics aren’t that hard. If you put a good sensor in something with a form factor similar to the old iSight camera, seems to me like it would be a winner. People seem to have embraced those stupid circle lights everywhere, why is a decent camera a bridge too far?

Guest19023892 4y ago

I agree. It's a little strange to complain about a lack of progress in webcams the past decade, and then ship similar quality hardware to decade old webcams. Why does everyone focus on a small form factor for webcams? Look at the size of microphones being sold today. The Blue Yeti is one of the most popular microphones and it's almost 30cm (12") in height. You might say, if you don't mind a large form factor, then go buy a DSLR or mirrorless camera. The problem there is they're not designed to be webcams. I watched one of the Lumina videos, and they were complaining the $2,000 Sony camera took forever to setup and configure for their demo. That's a problem. Someone solve it. Give me a large high quality camera that is designed to be a webcam first. I have lots of room on my desk, it doesn't need to fit in my pocket.

achow 4y ago
..plus add a good speaker and multiple mic (all available at commodity price).
iamacyborg 4y ago
> I watched one of the Lumina videos, and they were complaining the $2,000 Sony camera took forever to setup and configure for their demo Is that even a real problem? I started using my fuji mirrorless camera as a webcam during the pandemic and it was almost trivial to setup. All I needed to do was download some official software, plug the camera in and switch it on for it to start working as a webcam.
- underlines 4y ago
  Same here: Used my Sony A7III with USB and their software as an excellent webcam and since I bought the new Sony A7IV, all my client always ask in video calls, what Webcam that is. At my new employer I had several coworkers asking me how the heck I did the insane background blur. (They didn't know it was a mirrorless) If you have an old DSLR or a modern camera, you can use a 20USD Chinese HDMI Capture stick and get the best webcam on the planet.
  - aksss 4y ago