A lot of people use iPads or phones for this which have better cameras. If you are using a computer or laptop you can just install an app and use your phone as a webcam.
Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
571–580 of 794 posts
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello from Vermont. How does that help for meetings after, say, 3:30 this time of the year?
I am from Warsaw, Poland and believe it or not, Warsaw is about 7 degrees north from northernmost part of Vermont. Vermont spans 42 to 45 degrees while Warsaw is at 52 degrees. Did you know that most of people in Canada live at the lattitude of Croatia or south of it?
I lived in .be for 3 years. I believe it :-)
I think my favorite tidbit is that Rome and Boston are at the same latitude.
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#573The 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…
I'm just not sure I buy this... The number of people willing to pay significant money for a high end webcam was very small. Now my parents and their friends are talking about better lighting and camera angles. It seems like this industry is unusually ripe for a "better webcam" that "just works"
The problems are:
- most work applications don’t benefit from the quality
- most people use smartphones and tablets as daily drivers
- photo/video enthusiasts already own cameras that can be put into service.
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't make any sense. Mirrorless cameras cost a couple thousand dollars (I have one) and the last thing I am going to wear down/abuse this equipment with, is to jump into daily meeting lol. At the low end, there are decent webcams, like Logitech HD 1080p, but it costs over 100$ and honestly, it's a couple of years behind the current. There don't seem to be webcams of around 100 to 200$ that are state of the ar…
Logitech Brio is probably the most "state of the art" webcam you can find (and it's a few years old). Decent quality 4k (or 1080 at buttery FPS) with all manner of gubbins to correct lighting - amount, flicker, hue etc Oh, and does have depth sensing - with separate lens that'll scan your face and log you into windows (or out when you walk off).
> with separate lens that'll scan your face and log you into windows
And hence the problem. Now you have a camera is dependent on custom drivers deeply entwined with your OS that are a security risk. It also isn't likely to have usable drivers five years down the line.
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just not sure I buy this... The number of people willing to pay significant money for a high end webcam was very small. Now my parents and their friends are talking about better lighting and camera angles. It seems like this industry is unusually ripe for a "better webcam" that "just works"
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…
Well, I'm not quite sure I buy that they will look crappy (terrible CRI is an issue, but white balance does work) in low light, because they have larger apertures!
"It's the lens stupid"... is often true for bad images. More pixels (or even larger film) won't gain you that much, but more light will help with focus, contrast, saturation, noise etc.
Really, you could also say, "it's the lighting stupid"... but better lighting is a bit harder to set up than a larger lens. The cost can be moderate to make it really good. On the other hand making it just suck less, it usually pretty cheap. Thus the ring light you see suggested everywhere.
What amazes me is how good our eye is so that we don't notice terrible lighting.
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#576This article sort of glosses over the actual cost of designing the hardware. You should be able to get 500 units made working through a factory. Though minimum qty for parts can be as high as 5000, usually factories can find most components in smaller qty for 2-5x the price, especially since they already have relationships with suppliers. At $25-$35 bill of materials for something retailing at $250-$300 you're only l…
Are there any good guides anywhere you'd recommend for hardware startups - and how to reduce this $30K upfront cost? That is a lot of money.
The math I did was pretty basic. BOM*quantity + mold cost. Those are sort of the basic knobs you can fiddle with. Not all molds are equal. I was just talking with someone last week who was going to 3d print one of the housings for a component he's designing, since the quantities are low, but found a molding technique that's low quality but simple, and he said it was maybe an order of magnitude cheaper than anything I was familiar with, so learning about molding processes can allow you to design products with a cheaper upfront cost there. I think he said this mold he was looking at was like on the order of hundreds of dollars, instead of thousands of dollars that I typically expect.
BOM reduction can be tricky. Lowering your BOM makes more sense the larger your production runs, but when selecting components I tend to sort by price, then find the cheapest component that satisfies my needs. Of course, a more expensive component may allow you to skip other related circuitry, giving a cheaper overall build, so diving into datasheets is important.
Quantity is the other thing you have some control over, but lower quantity batches have higher per item costs. Setting up a pick and place for a single board takes the same amount of time as setting one up for a larger run. If your quantities are low enough eventually setup fees are likely to start being a bigger percentage. Quantity also effects BOM costs. You can easily pay 2x as much for a component at low volumes, so you may not actually save as much as you think you will.
I agree with you that 30k isn't cheap. But if you look at things historically, we've finally reached a price point for hardware, that you don't need to be a big business to even think about having consumer quality electronics. Apple started with kits 40 years ago and took investor money pretty early if I recall my history correctly. Today I expect it to be easier to bootstrap a hardware company since there's more infrastructure around bootstrapping. I've seen successful products that won't do a production run until they have a certain amount of preorders. But hardware is just always going to be fundamentally more expensive than software
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
My laptop lid is as thick as my smartphone. I think there is enough space. I think the technology from smart phones has not swept over to laptop lids yet.
What if the Smartphone camera cost $20, and the laptop camera cost $5 to manufacturer? Smart phones can maybe justify the extra $15, laptop makers cannot. If a laptop maker can't raise the price $15, it literally eats their profits.
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Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
My laptop lid is as thick as my smartphone. I think there is enough space. I think the technology from smart phones has not swept over to laptop lids yet.
What if the Smartphone camera cost $20, and the laptop camera cost $5 to manufacturer? Smart phones can maybe justify the extra $15, laptop makers cannot. If a laptop maker can't raise the price $15, it literally eats their profits.
Seriously? With laptops costing $1000+ I think they can afford to put in the $15 smartphone part from $300 smartphones in the higher end ones.
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#579I assumed everyone would be using a GoPro or something similar as their webcam if they needed a good webcam?
Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just not sure I buy this... The number of people willing to pay significant money for a high end webcam was very small. Now my parents and their friends are talking about better lighting and camera angles. It seems like this industry is unusually ripe for a "better webcam" that "just works"
Yeah I think they’d sell instantly. I looked all over for one and it doesn’t exist. The mirrorless camera solution sucks because there’s not an obvious winner there either (and you usually need a capture card/camlink to convert the output from the camera). The room scale ones like the LG meetup are overpriced and generally awful, the PTZ versions from them are even more expensive, use proprietary connectors for the m…
I personally wouldn't want to start in this market, because by the time anything could reasonably ship the COVID vaccine has been distributed enough and most people won't care that much anymore.