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Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

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Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#491

Post by fluidcruft »

huhtenberg wrote: post #44
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…

Take a look at Eizo (pun intended).

Recent Siemens MRI scanners come with Eizo displays. I had not heard of them previously, but they do seem pretty nice.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#492

Post by andrei_says_ »

dbspin wrote: post #463
atoav wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a freelance DOP and worked with cameras + lenses that coat more than a decent car. And while there is certainly room for improvement with typical webcams: the problem is in many cases not the camera, but the conditions under which it operates. Low light, shooting against the light, smeared laptop lenses, weird angles (not eye level), weird perspective framing, bad combination of light and framerates, mixe…

Freelance videographer and cam-op here. Your Arri experience is skewing your perspective. Any recent highly regarded DSLR will be significantly better in low light, intelligently apply both sharpening and noise reduction, and do so with auto focus in a package that weighs less than your Zeiss Prime. I AC for an Alexa Mini LF shooter, and it's interested to see just how far divergent evolution has got in this regard.…

Not OP but sitting the presenter in front of a north facing window, positioning the laptop camera at eye level and giving them a well adjusted $70 mic provides an improvement over any badly positioned camera in mixed color temperature silhouetted lighting situation.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#493

Post by riho »

chrismorgan wrote: post #385
riho wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally made an account, just to reply to this. With newer Canon DSLR bodies you can use the Canon Webcam Utility[1] to directly get the video feed show up as a webcam, with just a USB cable. I've been using the EOS R as my webcam with the RF 35mm F1.8 lens and it's working pretty great. I just hook it up with the USB-C cable and it shows up as a webcam. The only annoyance that I haven't been able to get around yet i…

What resolution does it produce? My Sony α6100 yields only 1024×576, which is not great, though still better than any laptop webcam at 1920×1080, or mostly even a phone or tablet front-facing camera at 1920×1080. (The Sony α6100 is also quite happy to run on USB power indefinitely, no fancy battery arrangement needed. I’ve used it thus for multi-hour webcam sessions, and plugged into a wall charger for multi-hour rec…

I'm not actually sure what resolution gets passed through the USB cable. I would assume it's either native resolution or at least 1080. But to be fair I'm mostly recording in 720p 50fps, since the 4k is cropped with the EOS R and I felt more fps is better for webcam footage (the other modes are capped at 30fps (25?) or have a crop). Besides, people don't need to see my face in more detail.

I haven't seen any noticeable delay in the footage so far, but now that you mention it, I'll definitely keep an eye on that.

The EOS R can draw some power from USB, but it doesn't seem to be nearly enough, or it doesn't work while recording or something.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#494

Post by TheRealPomax »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #329

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 th…

And then there's folks at the mid end, who buy an $80 Razer Kiyo purely for the decent video with built-in ring light so you're never backlit, with a separate $99 microphone and $150 audio interface. Buying all the bits separately gets you what this author wants, just not in a single tidy package.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#495

Post by ComodoHacker »

murkt wrote: post #260
ComodoHacker wrote: post #192

>Even if I think that 4k is not needed, I’m pretty sure it’s really a requirement to have in an upmarket webcam, as it will be really hard to sell a pricey webcam that can only do 1080p. 4K is absolutely not needed. You won't be streaming 4K from your home or average office space anyway. Our pipes are just not that fat yet in upstream direction.

Would you buy a webcam with 1080p only (I promise it's good though!) for $250-$300?

With all features described, yes, I would.

And please, can I add another one for $50? I can easily connect it to my decent-hardware-but-shitty-camera midrange smartphone and use instead of built-in camera.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#496

Post by jetpackjoe »

dhosek wrote: post #417
postalrat wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A camera off a $50 budget phone will probably beat every $100 webcam on the market. So why can't I get that same camera module, minus the phone parts but plus a usb interface, for $100.

When John Gruber did his "zoom" video edition of his podcast the Talk Show (back around WWDC), the video wasn't actually zoom. They used zoom for live interaction, but everybody had an iPhone mounted above their laptop screens for the actual recorded video and audio which was composited in post-production.

I still can’t believe that Apple doesn’t make this super easy.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#497

Post by bamurphymac1 »

redler wrote: post #383
notretarded wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

On iOS there's an app called Camo. There are probably others.

I’d second this. Camo is fantastic and with an armature mounted above my monitor I can get a much more flattering angle with a great picture even on an old 6+ front facing camera.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#498

Post by Already__Taken »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #494
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #329

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 th…

And then there's folks at the mid end, who buy an $80 Razer Kiyo purely for the decent video with built-in ring light so you're never backlit, with a separate $99 microphone and $150 audio interface. Buying all the bits separately gets you what this author wants, just not in a single tidy package.

The price for audio stuff seems truly out-of-this-world compared to everything else.

I get microphones have a lot of design/testing that might justify it. But all the interfacing gear seems ridiculous.

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