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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#171

Post by rlei »

I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam designed to solve some of these problems.

There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained the bestselling phone through now.

A few thoughts to add to the article:

- On why webcams aren't seeing innovation, I'd disagree that the market is too small. There's enough gross margin to produce a $B company just by selling webcams [0], especially if you can actually get customers excited about the product.

- A big reason there hasn't been innovation is that the space doesn't attract entrepreneurs (because hardware is viewed as hard) or investors (because hardware is viewed as hard).

- Size isn't everything. As the iPhone shows, you can get very good image quality from a tiny sensor and lens if you have the right tech supporting it. (At Lumina, most of our eng effort is on the software layer)

I would've loved to see Lumina in his comparison. We launched a few months ago and are seeing many reviewers prefer us over the Brio (Logitech's flaghip) [1]. Personally, I'd guess we're 60% of where we can be in terms of quality and think we can achieve a quality level between an iPhone and a DSLR, hopefully closer to the latter.

[0] https://s1.q4cdn.com/104539020/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/...

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/lumina-ai-webcam-review

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#172

Post by vetinari »

birdyrooster wrote: post #153
vetinari wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With gopro, it depends on the model and how you connect it. I did use gopro (an older one, hero3) as a webcam, and it did work, to a point. Hero3 has hdmi output (not clean, but it dissapears after few seconds), so connecting it via hdmi capture dongle did work as a standard usb webcam in MacOS. The picture was great, the latency was under 10 frames when doing 60 fps capture. The problem was, that it could not charge…

Try using it with Discord and get back to me. GoPro Hero 9 can charge while being used as webcam but it’s not compatible with the apps I care about.

With hero3 it is not a problem, see the very first sentence.

It does not stream over usb. There's no app to simulate webcam on the host operating system. Hero3 outputs hdmi, you use some hdmi-to-usb dongle, which are plain old USB UVC class devices and every operating system out there with usb support knows how to handle them. So if a logitech or whatever webcam works, this one will work too.

However, I see that hero9 has no hdmi out. That's the bummer.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#173

Post by lexx »

pintxo wrote: post #15

As I had a Canon DSLR lying around during Covid, I have repurposed it to a webcam using Canons webcam driver: https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se... Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur, depending on your used lens. For power there are modified "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.

I've done exactly the same with a canon dslr. Everybody asks me if I am a streamer

Many are jealous, i think. It's hard to understand through their poor webcams haha

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#174

Post by clan »

quartz wrote: post #167

I 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 hi…

Seen a lot of "meh" videos. But Julie Schiro has made a few actually good videos

https://m.youtube.com/c/JulieSchiro/videos

Personally I just wish that people would invest in a cheap $20 or so lavalier microphone.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#175

Post by masklinn »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #133
masklinn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phones have camera bumps. And that’s pretty annoying, a computer lid bump would snag into everything. > And screens could be thicker where needed. My phone’s thrice the thickness of my laptop’s lid. This would increase the laptop’s thickness by a lot, and mostly by voids.

The bump would go towards the keyboard, I'd think.

There's very little clearance in that direction, and the clearance which there is is necessary for the screen / lens not to touch the keyboard / case and get scratched.

So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to have a notch in the topcase.

And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge or below the screen), you need to have that notch through or below right below trackpad, which is less than optimally comfortable before you even consider that the accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the camera lens.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#176

Post by pryelluw »

rlei wrote: post #171

I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam designed to solve some of these problems. There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained…

Whats the privacy factor like? Does the camera software phone home? Do you track users ?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#177

Post by hgomersall »

rlei wrote: post #171

I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam designed to solve some of these problems. There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained…

I'd love to compare lumina too, but you don't support Linux so I'll have to accept a crap webcam over a non functioning one.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#178

Post by jkestner »

nojito wrote: post #131
feet wrote: post #84

Earlier 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.

That’s not what they did on the actual iPhone.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#179

Post by bjourne »

logifail wrote: post #124
jrk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lighting and composition can do a lot to compensate for a weak camera, but read the post: this isn’t saying “Zoom video looks bad [potentially because of bad lighting and composition],” it’s saying “even high-end webcams are enormously worse than even old, low-end/front-facing cell phone cameras in the same conditions, and it’s not getting better.” So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps. But this post…

> So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps $63 on a C920, add one window (typically ships free with your house/apartment) plus access to one truly special light source which although it's 93 million miles away you were lucky enough to get a free lifetime subscription to when you arrived on this planet. Why spent time worrying about what a cell phone camera can achieve in poor or uneven lighting if a bog-…

The point of the article is that even a shitty old cell phone handily beats a "mid-range" C920 webcam. Yes, lighting conditions are important to photography, but, as the author demonstrates, cell phone cameras are better even in those scenarios. Furthermore, if you live in northern latitudes you get very little sunlight during the winter so a "window" is not a sufficient solution.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#180

Post by markstos »

hgomersall wrote: post #177
rlei wrote: post #171

I'm the cofounder at Lumina - we're building a modern webcam designed to solve some of these problems. There's really been a lack of innovation in the entire home office space, with the webcam being particularly bad. It sucks that a decade-old product (Logitech C920) is still the bestselling product today -- that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained…

I'd love to compare lumina too, but you don't support Linux so I'll have to accept a crap webcam over a non functioning one.

Same.
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