591–600 of 794 posts
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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.
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…
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 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"
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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.…
I'm a colorist and have to clean up footage from everything from cellphones (a lot recently with the pandemic), gopros, and dslrs to alexas, phantoms, 35mm, and even IMAX footage. Trust me when I say that I've seen it all. Short answer is you're wrong, even the latest dslrs are miles and miles from those high end solution in nearly all scenarios (discounting ultra ISO lightless shooting that no one does for anything…
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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…
>and you usually need a capture card/camlink to convert the output from the camera Early on in the pandemic the major mirrorless camera providers (I believe at least Sony[1], Fujifilm[2], Canon[3], and Nikon[4]) all released software that lets you use any of their relatively recent cameras as webcams with the regular USB transfer/charging cable. A separate capture card is no longer a necessity. [1] https://imagingedg…
So it’s not a linear price scale because it is distorted at the lower end. There is no motivation for our benefactors to subsidise cameras beyond a certain quality so once you go beyond that you are paying full whack and the economics fall apart.
This principle applies pretty much right across the smart tech ecosystem.
The nice thing is though, that the stuff they are using to subsidise the expensive stuff is dirt cheap so if you’ve a little bit of smarts you can build your own gear for about a 10th of the price, but you will have to sacrifice some of the doo-dahs and bells and whistles but if what you’re going for is something that’s purely functional you will be fine. Use the money saved to buy an expensive streaming cam set up. Do the subsidising yourself.
> So there is a market gap between so-so webcams for $100-200 and a full-blown setup with a mirrorless camera... Don't know where you can buy a readymade one. However, if you don't mind DIY, try our free software project showmewebcam. It uses a Pi and its HQ sensor and some software glue to make a USB webcam [1]. You'll have a wide selection of affordable lenses [2] and cases [3] that people cook up for their persona…
I've been using this for a whole now and really happy. Looking over the repo it seems there has been some software improvements so I will upgrade mine now - saving the settings will be very useful as it's too dark for me by default. Thank you! Regarding the lens, I'm using the '6mm 3MP Wide Angle Lens for Raspberry Pi HQ Camera' and I have zero problems with it. I'm hardly moving in the way I use it as a simple webca…
>I have no problem with staying in focus and I just don't get what a few people are saying about distortion, I must be blind.
If you point it to a piece of rectangular paper you'll see the distortion. In the commonlands review link above, Max pointed that out with a picture as well.
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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…
But having a camera that takes in more light, everything else equal, can make a big difference all by itself.