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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#511

Post by prmoustache »

ketzo wrote: post #30
feet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop But yea, mic audio is always trash too

> just use a decent cam in the laptop I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger. Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding, camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop. Phones are "always" (although that might not…

> I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.

Sony RX0.

The things with webcam is nobody want to spend any substantial amount of money on a third party usb webcam and nobody is willing to pay his laptop 10 or 20% more because it has a quality camera inside.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#512

Post by prmoustache »

kylecordes wrote: post #351
adrusi wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphone cameras are small and far better sensors than what you get in webcams. They rely on software to produce images of the quality we're used to seeing, especially with less-than-ideal lighting, but the lenses and sensor are still far better than the Logitech C920. A webcam doesn't need the latest and greatest video hardware. Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image proce…

This is the answer. Camera and processor from a several-year-old smart phone, which is now quite cheap. Sell it for $500. So far no one has, there must be a reason no one can.

Nobody wants to spend that amount of money on a webcam. People would buy second hand Sony RX0 for that kind of thing if that was the case.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#513

Post by Jaruzel »

Two points I feel I have to make here:

1. If you absolutely need the best quality image you can have on a video call, use a mirrorless or DSLR photo camera that has 'clean HDMI out' and couple it with a HDMI capture device (which are now quite cheap for 1080p capture).

2. Most (if not all) video conferencing software applies heavy compression to the image of your video feed. Even if your local preview image shows you in ultra-sharp focus with fine detail, you can almost guarantee that people at the other end are seeing a soft fuzzy picture that looks like it's been upscaled from 240p.

So you have to ask yourself, is my laptop webcam, or the £50 no-name USB camera 'good enough'? - in most cases, the answer is probably 'yes'.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#514

Post by iamacyborg »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #498
modeless wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) This is my problem with all the webcam startups. So what if you can mask some of the problems of small sensors and lenses using machine learning that adds a whole new set of problems? You could have done tha…

I agree. It's a little strange to complain about a lack of progress in webcams the past decade, and then ship similar quality hardware to decade old webcams. Why does everyone focus on a small form factor for webcams? Look at the size of microphones being sold today. The Blue Yeti is one of the most popular microphones and it's almost 30cm (12") in height. You might say, if you don't mind a large form factor, then go…

> I watched one of the Lumina videos, and they were complaining the $2,000 Sony camera took forever to setup and configure for their demo

Is that even a real problem? I started using my fuji mirrorless camera as a webcam during the pandemic and it was almost trivial to setup. All I needed to do was download some official software, plug the camera in and switch it on for it to start working as a webcam.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#515

Post by yardstick »

xxs13 wrote: post #510
yardstick wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all laptops have a camera already, crappy as they may be, they still work. I don’t think laptop users are a big market for webcams? Isn’t it more for desktops where you have the luxury of space and bulk?

The latest Gaming Laptops no longer have webcams ... It's a growing trend ... if you're a gamer who spent 2000$ on a laptop and also want to do some remote work/interviews you need an external webcam...

Growing trend in a niche market I would suggest. I know people who have 2 laptops - one for gaming, one for work (with webcam etc). Because the gaming laptop is too bulky to carry around, it's effectively a desktop.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#516

Post by bodge5000 »

Honestly if I were to buy another webcam beyond the cheapest "yeh that'll do" one I could find, the main thing I'd be looking for is microphone quality and features. Sure, I could and have brought a USB mic, but a webcam is pointed directly at you (like a shotgun mic, which seems ideal for this kind of thing), whereas the bulk of a USB mic can be harder to position in a way that doesn't block your forward monitor. If it had a configurable mute shortcut, with a little light on it to show its mute status, I'd buy one in a second.

In fact, saying all that I don't even think what I want is a webcam, I want a USB webcam-mounted microphone. I do remember seeing one once, but its very old now and has none of that mute functionality. Wish someone would make one again

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#517

Post by xxs »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #297

We 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 s…

>Laptop mics are a different story, especially with fans on high

Switch off your own video - most of the work is video encoding, and unless you have dedicated hardware, it'd suck - sorry, blow hard, the fan that's it.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#518

Post by xxs »

kyriakos wrote: post #36
lucb1e wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not su…

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.

We use it as a joke internally. It requires plain English, spoken slowly with a generic US accent (even fake) - anything else is proper bad. To be fair it has improved nontrivially, though.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#519

Post by dan-robertson »

There’s a bunch of advice on improving video calls here: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/ It touches on webcams. Some other important things for video calls apart from webcam picture quality are:

- latency. This matters everywhere (webcam, webcam driver, codecs, network, graphics pipeline, monitor software, physically switching the pixels) but I would expect webcams to introduce higher latency due to generally not being good

- audio matters a lot (as does audio latency and slowing down audio to synchronise it with slow video)

- some lighting things

- to some extent eye contact will also be wrong with a webcam so maybe the FaceTime style thing where your eyes are ‘corrected’ to appear to be looking at the camera instead of your screen would help

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#520

Post by blablabla123 »

modeless wrote: post #433
adrusi wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphone cameras are small and far better sensors than what you get in webcams. They rely on software to produce images of the quality we're used to seeing, especially with less-than-ideal lighting, but the lenses and sensor are still far better than the Logitech C920. A webcam doesn't need the latest and greatest video hardware. Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image proce…

> Give it a camera module from a midrange 2017 smartphone and use the latest image processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today. Sorry, that's exactly the strategy of these webcam startups, and Apple with the Studio Display, and the results empirically suck. Even if you could get 2017 smartphone quality (which is still apparently an unsolved problem), why should you settle for that in a we…

As stated somewhere else, at the end the video will go through very lossful compression and often be scaled down when used at work. I mean I'm now at my 4th webcam since the pandemic started because the other cams were: too dark, constantly zooming in and out for no reason (MS Cinema Lifecam), poor image. I now sticked with the Logitech C920 because I can manually set brightness/contrast/activate autofocus.

I think that understates how bad the current state of webcams really is. Esp. when you move around a lot while talking/there's an unusual light situation. IMHO first these core problems need to be solved (and then of course it'd be great be build upon that)

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