Why can’t you buy a good webcam? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#321

Post by em500 » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #291

manderley wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tons of expensive monitors available that cater to the professional market. The whole premise is not based in reality. Apple simply has the highest mindshare among average products.

There’s literally no good monitors with the proper resolution for MacOS outside of the fragile LG ultrafine line. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem, nobody is making 27” 5k displays right now.

What does "proper resolution for MacOS" mean in this case? There are tons of 27" 4k that work fine in macOS in Retina mode and matches the medium tier iMac (their low end today is still 21.5" 1080p). Unless you declare everything below 5k subpar, I don't see where you're coming from.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#322

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #101

avian wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they give the product a hilariously user-hostile product name, like “PQS GRT46782-WT” as an extra f-you to the user. That is also a strategy to prevent product comparisons and unbiased reviews. They quickly cycle through product names and sell a certain product no. only in a limited geographical area. Doesn't matter if a consumer org/magazine/someone on reddit/your friend/etc. does a review. The product will b…

It becomes even more unawesome when the same product identifier actually has different parts in it. When looking for a nice display a couple of years ago I clearly remember reading about some that were promising yet getting confoundingly variable reports, until some tore their hardware apart and revealed that the internals were different.

[deleted]

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#323

Post by steve_adams_86 » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #296

gaudat wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, so often I ask if the seller can provide a "perfect" display, that is, without any artifacts on the display. This adds 100-200 CNY to the price. There's a Chinese panel manufacturer called BOE that makes products competitive with some of the lower-end Samsung / LG panels. I got one 15.6" 2160p external display with a BOE panel that offers 100% sRGB coverage. I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitu…

> I can see a huge difference compared to my Dell Latitude laptop display. And outside of a few occupations that might actually require pixel-perfect colour, what does this matter? Is this like the audiophile world, where people argue about seemingly subjective things that no else cares about? The customer interprets colours differently than you, the customer sees colours differently than you, and the customer is usi…

I enjoy having a high quality display for all kinds of reasons. Better comfort while programming, accurate colour representation while looking at photos, having a good sense of what things might look like for others (accurate colour means you might be the middle ground of your users experiences, inaccurate colour means you can’t be sure at all), and otherwise, if I’m going to spend a lot on something I’ll own for half a decade I would prefer to get something accurate. The price difference isn’t sufficient enough to justify saving a little bit to have a poor colour experience.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#324

Post by joegahona » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

alteriority wrote: post #310

My solution: Download DroidCam, use your phone's camera as a webcam. Night and day difference versus awful built-in laptop cameras, only takes a few minutes to pair the first time. Granted, the positioning is a bit annoying. If I did it more often, I'd get a tripod.

I do this with Camo. Same idea. An old SE 1st-Gen and Velcro on the back of one of my monitors solves the positioning issue.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#325

Post by joegahona » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #303

At my workplace, I’ve had effectively zero video calls since the pandemic began. We’re just using audio (occasionally someone will leave their camera on, but it’s uncommon). Are video calls in other companies mandatory? More common than audio-only calls? Even at my previous job at a small tech startup, where the entire company was remote from day one, video chats were rare.

Video chats are more personal. We communicate a lot via body language.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#326

Post by sudosysgen » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

mattowen_uk wrote: post #20

I've also investigated this quite deeply. As I'm sure most of us know, the main problems with 'webcams', either the built-in ones or USB ones that you perch on top of your monitor, are the lens size, and the CCD/CMOS image sensor size. Manufacturers spouting specs like '4k' are deliberately misleading the public if the sensor and/or the lens aren't also upgraded. The only cost-viable methods to get 'broadcast quality…

I have a 7$ Chinese knockoff HDMI-USB dongle, it works perfectly well even in Linux. Quality is quite good.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#327

Post by julianozen » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

Has anyone investigated buying a top tier android phone from like 2015 or so and then just making that a permanent webcam? Surely that would be relatively cheap and high quality.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#328

Post by tmountain » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #40

The reason you can’t buy a good webcam is the same reason you can’t buy a high quality monitor outside of LG’s unreliable apple collab. The lazy conglomerates who sell these peripherals often don’t actually produce the parts in them. They simply rebrand commodity cameras and IPS panels in a crap plastic housing and slap their logo on it. Then they give the product a hilariously user-hostile product name, like “PQS GR…

It seems like some company there (besides Apple), should seize the opportunity to differentiate themselves on quality, and deliver supply-chain controlled "boutique" hardware, which I'm certain many would shell out for.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#329

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

The real reason is buried in the article:

You can’t buy a good webcam because the number of people willing to pay a lot of money for a high end webcam is very small.

At the lower end, people are satisfied with their built in laptop parts or a cheap webcam that sits on top of their monitor.

At the high end, people go down the rabbit hole of buying a do-everything mirrorless camera that they can use for so much more than just a webcam.

A high end webcam would have to be cheap enough that the first group doesn’t mind spending a bit more, but not so expensive that the enthusiast target audience just decides to buy a full-featured mirror less camera instead.

Granted, there is a lot of room for improvement in that budgetary middle ground, but how many people actually care? Common webcams actually perform decently when given proper lighting conditions. We’re not streaming high-bitrate 1080p H.265 on our 5-person Zoom calls. After compression and denoising the extra sharpness and low noise of a high end camera doesn’t add much benefit.

Enthusiasts are a difficult group to market to because they have extremely high expectations. They’d also rather spend weeks scouring the Internet for the perfect deal on a used mirrorless camera than to spend a dollar more than necessary to buy a high-end webcam.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#330

Post by jacurtis » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #326

mattowen_uk wrote: post #20

I've also investigated this quite deeply. As I'm sure most of us know, the main problems with 'webcams', either the built-in ones or USB ones that you perch on top of your monitor, are the lens size, and the CCD/CMOS image sensor size. Manufacturers spouting specs like '4k' are deliberately misleading the public if the sensor and/or the lens aren't also upgraded. The only cost-viable methods to get 'broadcast quality…

I have a 7$ Chinese knockoff HDMI-USB dongle, it works perfectly well even in Linux. Quality is quite good.

Just to add my own experience, I have a friend who had the Elgato Link and it died. He decided to give a $15 amazon one a try and he said it works "just as good" as the Elgato one. So I then bought my own $15 one (having never used Elgato before) and I can also say that it does the job.

I don't know how to further qualify it, you expect it to convert HDMI into USB and it does it. The resulting quality is amazing. So it performs its function.