Although this was a fascinating article, the quality of webcams is pretty low on my list of things that could use improvement in the teleconferencing experience.
Webcams aren't good enough
291–300 of 610 posts
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#292I'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…
You failed to mention that your webcam is a whopping 700 dollars.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#293The logitech C920 can put out incredible video, if you have access to every setting. For some reason logitech puts the training wheels on and doesn't let you adjust every single setting like gain. There was an incredible app called "webcam settings" for mac that let you refine that webcam like putting a dslr into manual mode. I was able to get it so dialed in you thought it was a top of the line webcam. That software…
On linux you can use v4l2-ctl to fine tune the webcam settings (focus, gain, white balance, etc). The C920 has really poor firmware, none of the auto settings work well. Auto focus is particularly bad. I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings of my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions. The low light performance of the C920 hardware is quite bad, but if you have adequate lighting and…
"I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings of my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions."
Yeah I have the same. I have saved settings from guvcview which are loaded after boot and after resume from suspend.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#294Why can't apple put the iphone rear camera in the MacBook?
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Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your software works only on Windows, you've written non-portable software. Likely, you have all your core logic mixed up with Windowsy UI and now you're stuck there. If it works on Windows and Mac, you've written portable software but just can't be bothered to support Linux. At a guess the problem is that you want to ship binaries only and don't want to deal with doing all the packaging and testing for Linux. For…
When you write drivers there's no such thing as portable code. You need to target different APIs, different environment assumptions, etc. Sure, there's some common core most likely, but I think this rant is misplaced when talking about a hardware company. The software postprocessing is a different question and could be more common... But you're still specialising it for DX / v4l2+gui / whatever macos uses. That said.…
Maybe in 2002, but it's a USB webcam in 2022, if you're writing your own drivers from scratch on any platform rather than using the standards-compliant ones, I'd first wonder if you haven't got a case of NIH syndrome rather than an actual case of being constrained by the standards.
But maybe they genuinely cannot use standard protocols for some reason, then sure, writing a Linux driver might not be worth it.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#296I 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…
This is my exact experience, except with an A6000 that I already owned. I wouldn’t recommend it for most people since like you said there’s a lot of accessories required to get a good result, but for people like me who enjoy iterating on their home office setup it’s a fun project.
My favorite feature of DSLR/MILC webcams is the depth of field effect. It’s pretty subtle, but adds an air of professionalism vs the default zoom background blur feature.
I’ll probably get key lights at some point but in the mean time I’m using regular floor lamps with Hue bulbs, which does let me do things like play with the light color. I’ve found a very slight purple hue in the background really makes the foreground pop.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#297We just use webcams to say "hi!" and all that stuff, then turn them off, someone has a powerpoint on, and even if someone else left their camera on, noone is looking at them.
So basically, a vga camera would be enough to recognize my face, smile and wave, and after that, it's audio only.
Laptop mics are a different story, especially with fans on high,... and bluetooth headset mics.. or cabled earphones mics... some seem to work really great, and some people seem to be talking from somewhere deep inside a well or even worse, and there is no seeming price/audio_quality correlation.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hm. Interesting: you could put the battery in the screen making it quite a bit thicker, and then have the base thinner, that would change the balance though and it might not be as stable when sitting open on a desk. It'd be great to have a 20 hour life laptop though.
Or we could rearrange cooling so fans stay on the bottom of the machine with heat pipes leading up to behind the screen where the main board is
Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
This allows for a larger battery with more run time, better camera, and it should keep the balance of the machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
There are options
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#299This 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…
Unless someone is living under a rock (at least anyone in the use-phone-as-webcam territory), they probably have an Android phone if they don't have an iPhone.
Any decent Android phone should work too. I'm sure there are many apps enabling this. While they probably have worse image quality than iPhone, they'd definitely be much better than those cheapo webcams.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#300It honestly doesn’t matter if you primarily use your webcam for zoom, teams, etc. you could have an 8k cinema grade camera and the image other people will see is still compressed to death dogshit.