Webcams aren't good enough
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Webcams aren't good enough
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Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#2Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway.
Anyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#3I had a Logitech C920 that died a couple years ago and when I went to find a better replacement I ended up buying a... Logitech C920. I couldn't find anything that seemed significantly better that wasn't a lot more money. I regret the purchase, but I'm glad I didn't just spend 3 times as much on a still-not-that-great webcam. I was thinking of finding a second-hand digital camera on eBay, but maybe instead I'll see if a friend has an old iPhone.
Though you'd think with the WFH revolution there would be at least one company out there making a high-quality purpose-built webcam.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#4I recently got the Obsbot tiny 4k webcam. Even though 4k won't come through on videoconferencing software the color seems much more natural than Logitech webcams.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#5Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway. Anyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
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Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#6Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway. Anyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.
That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.
(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#7The webcam market is a niche market. Even game streamers, arguably the most "consumer" like target audience that cares about quality, will often put the image of their face in a corner of their screen.
The simple fact of the matter that the target for webcam seems to be to be either good enough or to be better than the competition. Neither of those are very high bars.
There are some improvements in webcam land. There's a trend towards more higher-quality consumer webcams even if they're ridiculously expensive for what they deliver.
One problem I have noticed with using phones as webcams is that often the image will look distorted if you're not right in the center of the camera. The closer you go towards the edges, the more your face will get distorted in width or in height. This is a natural consequence of how these tiny lenses are able to get such a wide picture so I can't really fault phone manufacturers for this, but it's something to keep in mind when you pick the more obvious solution and just stick your phone to your monitor.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#8I am hoping that Apple's Continuity Camera "just works" as the camera and lighting are excellent. I was on the hunt for a decent webcam last year and surprised this didn't "just work" already without flakey 3rd party apps, etc.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#9I use these guys’ software on my Mac to use an iPhone as the webcam. It really does a better job, since I can adjust the camera settings.
The next macOS will have this capability baked in so I probably won’t need the third party software.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#10Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway. Anyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing
As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.