701–710 of 794 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seriously. Take that $15 and apply to 8 other things. The memory. The speaker. The keyboard. Your $500 laptop is now $600. Your competitor is still $500. You lose.
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…
This makes it sound like the two requirements are in contradiction but in both you're asking for the price to be lower.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you could elaborate on that you'd definitely have a interested audience - of at least one
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely don’t understand why they stopped doing that...
Maybe it's related to the reason why you can't use the 5k iMac as an external monitor. I can't remember where I found the sources, but the problem was that they essentially needed to video cards to drive the thing and making sure that both sides of the output looked identical was tricky and not something that an external source would be able to do.
Earlier 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…
However, even with some minimal effort on lighting (turning off lights behind me, keeping an overhead light and a light somewhat in front of me), my Zoom calls still look like shit (as do most of my co-workers', who are mostly using Macs).
Now, Google has put a lot of work into my phone's camera, work that I doubt Dell has put into the little built-in webcam on my laptop. But I doubt the camera in my phone is a significant part of the phone's BOM cost (though maybe I'm wrong about this). Would my laptop cost that much more if some more attention was paid to its integrated webcam?
And then Zoom is compressing the hell out of the video and is likely destroying quality in several places in the pipeline.
I agree that lighting is important, but I don't think it explains all that much of the issue we're talking about here. The camera hardware sucks, and the software pipeline is optimized for reliable delivery, not quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, mixed light temperatures, low CRI lighting, etc. If you take an 40k€ Arri and a 20k€ Zeiss Prime…
The problem is laptop lids are a lot thinner than smartphones and just don't have the depth to contain a decent optic. Apple have tried to mitigate this a bit in the new M1 machines using some computational photography to improve the image. The Surface machines from Microsoft actually stand out in this regard. Because the brains of the machine are in the same section as the screen and camera, they are a lot thicker a…
I Skype with family a couple of times a week. I'd gladly pay another $100-200 for a better integrated webcam.
Earlier 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seriously. Take that $15 and apply to 8 other things. The memory. The speaker. The keyboard. Your $500 laptop is now $600. Your competitor is still $500. You lose.
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…
I have worked as DOP in the past and couldn't agree more. What people need is a guide on how to manipulate the scene in front of the camera using what resources they have, plus a list of cheap or free things they can go get to help. A better camera would be way down the list for me. Top of the list would be a light panel and some rudimentary adjustable grip for it. Lighting changes, so over powering ambient light a b…
A better-quality camera for my laptop would turn my Zoom quality from "garbage" to "satisfactory". Yes, if I wanted to go from there to "movie quality" I'd have to invest in better lighting and other things, but that's not important enough to me to go to that bother. A better-quality camera (built into my laptop; I don't want to have yet another peripheral with yet another cable) would be something I'd happily pay for.
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…
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…
...which bought Korean manufacturer Hydis (was originally part of SK Hynix), so you'll often see panels marked "BOE-Hydis".