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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#181

Post by masklinn »

dingleberry420 wrote: post #158
jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop screens are much thinner than phones are thick so a phone actually has more space for the camera in the dimension that is most restricted.

> Laptop screens are much thinner Do they have to be?

They naturally are because there's just not much there, it's just an LCD.

Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume, making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much thicker).

It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush). Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that expense and inconvenience.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#182

Post by bluescrn »

melony wrote: post #161

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.

It's a shame that they'll never have a reason to make a standalone webcam using some of their existing tech.

Maybe we just need a software solution that can turn a phone into a webcam (edit: oh, Apple did that already)

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#183

Post by savy91 »

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.

You may want to try Obsbot meet, I recently switched to it and it's pretty decent on Linux

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#184

Post by KennyBlanken »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #110
moralestapia wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share some quick tips?

Sure! 1) Avoid fluorescent lighting like the plague. You’ll look sickly. 2) Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your lighting is inadequate. It can be small it doesn’t matter. Place it diagonally from you at eye level. 3) Camera at eye level. 4) If you want to get fancy, get another lamp higher above you (several feet) and place it opposite your main lamp for a backlight. So if your main light is front ri…

> Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your lighting is inadequate.

Just buy a high-CRI LED bulb from the hardware store.

It shouldn't necessarily be "warm". In an office only used during daylight, and lit with commercial lighting, a "warm" bulb is going to look extremely orange and out of place.

What matters most is matching color temperatures of your light sources.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#185

Post by cto_of_antifa »

WheatM wrote: post #140
logifail wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

Imagine the mind blowing privilege of not just having a separate home office, but having being able to design it to yoru exact specifications with a window facing north, and telling people to "just add windows". Some people on here are so out of touch.

No post body was provided.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#186

Post by ncmncm »

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…

What sucks most is that Logitech, which used to be a proud name (back when "Feels good / Feels better") has gone totally to shit. Even their mice are designed to fail in a year. (Spill on the desk, the mouse that only got damp on the bottom is dead, dead, dead. That can't be accidental.)

A full article on what went wrong at Logitech corporate could be enlightening, if not helpful.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#187

Post by gnabgib »

bradknowles wrote: post #21

I first saw this article years ago, and I'm glad to see it has been updated with some more modern webcams. I'm also sad to see that the state of the art in this space hasn't changed much for webcams, especially on the Mac. I do have an older iPhone 7 that I could put to use like this, but I'm starting to become convinced that maybe I actually do need to buy a somewhat newer iPhone device with multiple lenses, and use…

Yeah it's a 2020 article that HN commented on quite extensively within a month of original post: 196pts, 289 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#188

Post by xeromal »

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.

I can probably count the number of people on linux who will buy this webcam on my two hands.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#189

Post by DHPersonal »

jhgb wrote: post #77
nextos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cameras are not designed to record HD video during long periods of time.

Does it need to be recording? Perhaps you could just capture live HDMI output.

This is a confusion of terms. By "recording" people can mean both writing data to the card and activating the sensor to receive information. The latter is what overheats a camera, and the process is the same for both sending data directly to HDMI or recording it to a card. Some older sensors on Canon digital SLRs would actually begin to burn themselves out just by having the screen display what the sensor was receiving (also known as "live view") for more than about 10 minutes.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#190

Post by kyriakos »

OJFord wrote: post #59
kyriakos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.

I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.

That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people in our team are not native English speakers and it does a really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the meeting is pure comedy.
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