The iPhone's camera has more engineering resources poured into it than the other three webcams reviewed added together, it is disingenuous to expect similar quality.
Webcams aren't good enough
161–170 of 610 posts
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#162This made me laugh. > Using an iPhone as a webcam is easily the best option without dropping an excess of $1,000 for professional camera gear. Using the iPhone you already own, or a recent hand-me-down, a moderate investment in lighting, and Reincubate Camo, you can get excellent results and none of the frustration and hassle that accompanies standalone webcams. I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is…
The simplicity of a normal webcam also has a huge value.
I hate waiting a few extra minutes at the beginning of a meeting while someone tries to get their complex webcam setup working. Some people can plan ahead and make it all work. Some people are always fighting with audio settings or restarting OBS or adjusting their webcam and so on. Wasted time for everyone involved.
I’m not looking forward to the new era of people messing with their iPhone mounts to their laptops to get the camera juuust right as we start every meeting.
Let’s just use the built-in webcams and get on with our meetings. Or if you want to use a fancy setup, you must have it all ready and tested before the meeting starts.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#163Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#164There is a reason that for hundreds of years painters and (later) photographers have preferred working in spaces with North-facing windows[0], and that is because it's a simple way of ensuring neutral, even light. My home office is (by design) in a room with one North-facing window. I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my webcam feed is. I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant,…
Also, my experience with the 920
Is that it performs well (better than others I have) in low light. None of the samples from the article were low light. Most folks are in dimly lit conditions, and that’s where these tend to do better.
Fundamentally, webcams suffer from the same problem as n95 masks: prior to the pandemic, everything was geared towards cheap, it just wasn’t a huge market. To invest in retooling would be a risk, there is no guarantee the market will be there.
People are throwing a thousand dollars at phones with a significantly better profit margin. Webcams will NEVER catch up. He pretty much says this at the end of the article.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#165This is one those markets that clearly doesn't appreciate picture quality enough. I have at least 6 different web cams and have the same experience as the author that they are all crappy in slightly different ways.
It seems the point-and-shoot camera makers have all the parts and technology available to their teams to make a really nice pro-sumer web cam and given they are looking for adjacent markets I'm kind of surprised there aren't any out there. They all seem to have the equivalent of 'camo' (aka software that turns the camera into a web cam) but none of them seem to have packaged a camera specifically for this niche.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#166Here's a question: why do people care so much about what they look like or how the camera displays them? Personally, I care more about the content being delivered than what someone (including the scene) looks like.
This is a question outside the scope of webcams alone … Most people, consciously and subconsciously, judge people by their appearance.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#167I upgraded my video and audio setup during the pandemic since I figured even at up to $1k it was cheaper than the office space it was replacing.
After about a month of research I was surprised to find how difficult it was to evaluate options and how few of those options were plug-and-play.
I had assumed the explosion in livestreaming over the last few years would mean best practices would be easy to find and great high quality cameras purpose built for streaming would exist, but didn't find that to be the case at all.
Ultimately I took a chance on a heavily discounted open box ZV1 but it wasn't until I married it with a 4k capture card (USB streaming was meh), a key light (lighting matters so much!), a mic (& arm to hold it), AND an ali-express battery-to-dc connector (so it could run all day) that I finally hit the sweet spot of "clearly better" and "easy to use all day".
Worth it in the end, but a lot of work.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#168I 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 i…
Logitech dominates the market, and it dominates it by marketing spend, not on making a better product, since they know that the average consumer will never know the difference.
I bought a C920 on the basis of many shilled reviews, and I kneel to the power of their marketing department every time I turn that piece of junk on.
I use the bad Mac onboard for almost all work conferencing because it's right there and doesn't require me to occupy a port on the laptop for in the end just different bad video quality.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
It's simple math. To hold the camera housing of an iPhone camera the thickness has to go up which means the entire top lid needs to become thicker. This will easily double the weight of the laptop.
Only if that means using twice as much metal - I would expect instead it'd mean adding a thin strip of metal around the circumference of the lid. That would add a few grams, I'm sure, but hardly doubling.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day to the next. Don't you think they would've done that instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution for the new Continuity camera?
No, I definitely don't expect apple to make rational design choices at this point Exhibit A, this thread They've been shifting design choices in a direction for years and this is what came of it. They could have made other choices but did not
Designing a laptop by sacrificing portability for camera quality is absolutely not rational design. No one is walking around taking photos with their macbook.
It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which, until recently, most people would use very rarely.
Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop would very much fall under irrational.