Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

vsevolod.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 794 posts

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#621

Post by gonehome »

iamatworknow wrote: post #607
gonehome wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I had read at the time (may be better now) that software was bad and the low quality output from it negated most of the benefits of going with the mirrorless setup in the first place.

That's possible, but as others in the comments have mentioned it may be more people with bad lighting/positioning who just decided it was the camera/USB software that was faulty. Still, maybe it does suck. I never tried any of these programs myself because all of my cameras are just slightly too old to work with them.

The people I learned this from were professional YouTube people who have high quality lighting - it was the software.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#622

Post by centimeter »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #349
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…

> 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. This was my experience exactly after testing different setups. I still use my Lumix GX8 for photography and home videos, but it wasn't even close to worth the trouble of maintaining the setup compared to a ~$100 Logitech option that…

I have to imagine that everyone who says this only tried a cheap lens with a teeny aperture. The narrow depth of field of a good camera+lens combo looks vastly different from a consumer webcam, and survives compression (easily, in fact, since the low frequency data in the background gets quantized less brutally than the high-frequency data of your face). In fact, I think that’s the primary visual cue for the “pro” look. Your GX8 is MFT, so you'd need a pretty wide lens (at least f/2, ideally f/1.4) to appreciate this.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#623

Post by alchemism »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #589
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…

All of those things may be true, but when I zoom using my webcam the picture is far worse than when I zoom using my pixel4. Same goes for audio. I really, really wish I could get the calibre of A/V hardware in my high end phone as a separate device to plug into my computer. I did buy a nice microphone so I'm halfway there, but the webcam problem remains.

There are numerous Android/IOS apps which make your phone either a webcam or network camera.

Some examples are EpoCam, Camo, NDI Camera, etc.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#624

Post by kylecordes »

iamatworknow wrote: post #588
gonehome wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I understand these are all awful in their own way, typically with quality problems and extra latency as well as the extra complexity of the software.

The obvious solution is a camera mode in which it presents itself over USB as a webcam… As far as I know no "real" camera at any price does this.

I solve the problem with a Camlink, but it really should not be necessary.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#625

Post by EsotericAlgo »

roland35 wrote: post #86

If you have a Canon DSLR camera, you can download their webcam utility to plug it in via USB cable. This is handy because you don't need an HDMI capture card! The only problem I have now is I need an A/C adapter for my camera, as the battery only lasts about 1.5 hours. I found that using my standard zoom lens is fine, the 50mm portrait lens looks better for pictures but that is overkill for a Zoom meeting! Any DSLR c…

As a note, for older Canon DSLRs that aren't supported you can pick up a cheap capture card on ebay for $15 and an AC adapter for a similar price. Using Magic Lantern you can get clean HDMI out and do any cropping needed in a tool like OBS. Works wonders. So much so I'm told my video is too clear at least once a week.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#626

Post by jdeibele »

bserge wrote: post #170
Hamuko wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a chance that the assembled Chinese monitors actually use second grade panels that the big makers wouldn't accept? I remember getting a 27-inch 1440p display from a Chinese manufacturer for really cheap back in high school. It should've been the exact same panel as was in Apple's iMacs. However, the were some quality issues with it long term and it's definitely suffering from burn-in that I don't think th…

That was the case with noname Korean/Chinese monitors a decade ago that used high quality IPS panels found in Apple and other professional displays - they used rejected panels, which had various issues (mostly dead pixels afaik). https://techreport.com/review/23291/those-27-inch-ips-displa... But overall, they were a great purchase quality/performance/cost wise.

Bought mine on Amazon for $400 six years ago. It stopped showing a picture but I get a white flicker at the base of the screen every few seconds.

I could (and probably should) investigate fixing it but it was easier to buy a 2160p Philips for $240. Only issue with the Philips is it doesn't have a VESA mount and it would be difficult to make some sort of jury-rigging work.

I run them attached to a Mac Mini and use the DisplayPort on the monitor. At one point I believe HDMI (or maybe just the Mac) wouldn't do 1440p. I'm copying stuff from an Intel Mac mini to an M1 and I'm able to toggle back and forth using HDMI for the Intel just fine.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#627

Post by throwaway09223 »

alchemism wrote: post #623
throwaway09223 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those things may be true, but when I zoom using my webcam the picture is far worse than when I zoom using my pixel4. Same goes for audio. I really, really wish I could get the calibre of A/V hardware in my high end phone as a separate device to plug into my computer. I did buy a nice microphone so I'm halfway there, but the webcam problem remains.

There are numerous Android/IOS apps which make your phone either a webcam or network camera. Some examples are EpoCam, Camo, NDI Camera, etc.

Yes, this is good advice thank you.

The real problem I'm trying to solve is being able to use my phone while running a zoom, though!

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#628

Post by redisman »

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.

It's funny that Zoom disappears in the final product. The audio feed is recorded and re-synced on each source machine with a different software and sounds like the same with the video feed.

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#629

Post by crazygringo »

I don't understand the desire here.

The classic Logitech C920 ($80) is an excellent true 1080p webcam. [1] It's been around for years.

Who needs better than 1080p from a webcam?

You can manually adjust focus, exposure, color temperature, shutter speed, zoom, everything you need.

Once you've got that, everything else is lighting. Most people drastically underestimate how much of photo/video quality is actually about lighting, as opposed to the camera or lens.

As for audio, if you're investing in the higher quality of an external webcam anyways, then you'll never want a microphone in the webcam. The placement is inherently bad.

You'll want either a lapel mic for normal interviews or meetings, or a podcasting mic on a desk tripod for more serious stuff. A mounted shotgun mic is a kind of in-between option too if you don't want it visible.

[1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/webcams/c920-pro-hd-...

Re: Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

#630

Post by jonfw »

greedo wrote: post #483
pembrook wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's extremely frustrating is that Apple makes an excellent 27" 5K monitor in a nice housing for $1800. The only problem is that it comes with an iMac... So clearly, Apple could sell a monitor for about $1600, that would be perfectly compatible with Mac Pros, mac mini and as a secondary monitor for all the various MacBooks.

iMac is due for a refresh soon, and I'm hoping that this means an M1 iMac that can serve as a Thunderbolt Display
Post reply on HN