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Why webcams aren’t good enough

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Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#131

Post by ksec »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #44
corysama wrote: post #15

Different article from a month ago “Why can’t you buy a good web cam?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504771 Lots of points. Big one being that the market is bifurcated into: 1. People who just want the minimum as cheap as possible. 2. People willing to pay enough to buy a mirrorless photo camera and plug it in as a web cam when they need it.

I see this pattern everywhere - the market bifurcating into a) race-to-the-bottom garbage products that are barely crossing the legal threshold of fit for purpose, and are essentially a huge waste of natural resources, and b) quality goods sold to specialists or companies, usually severely overpriced (to cover low volume of sales, and/or just because the market will bear it). Does it have a name in economics? Are the…

Polarization is used to describe something similar for Job Market. But I am not aware of an exact term for Product. Bad money drives out good could also be used to describe it, or basically Good Enough is the enemy of better and best.

The problem is most people have very little understand of quality. And that is why Marketing matters.

In WebCam, most dont cares much about the quality because you rarely use it. It wasn't until pandemic people were forced to use it more often did they realise how crap it was.

Marketing is about educating customers why your product is better, how you should spend more on it. And Apple is an example, they are exceptionally good at it.

> usually severely overpriced

Most of the time I find that to be false. Not because of the market will bear it, but those market also requires constant innovation so profits are being funnel back into R&D. Generally speaking most "market will bear it" type of product disappear within 5 years when a competitor found they could make something better and cheaper.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#132

Post by mikestew »

guenthert wrote: post #111

Hmmh, I couldn't care less about webcams. I'm not that pretty and not all that eager to share the interior of my dwelling. I do however care about sound quality. With my accent and mumbling I need all the help I can get. Others reported that the camera in their phone beats most webcams, but what about the microphone(-array)? The sound quality of phablets hasn't quite won me over. Is there anything better available, s…

I'm an amateur musician with a USB audio interface, several hundred dollars worth of microphones (though for office work, it's just the Shure SM27 condenser), and wired set of good headphones. And it is glorious. Until everyone got used to it, I got consistent compliments on the sound quality. You'll sound like a radio DJ. Because everything is wired, latency is minimal and a lot less of "okay, go head. No, go ahead..."

Now, that's a lot of money and fiddling. Bang-for-the-buck IMO is the already-mentioned Blue Yeti, along with a wired set of headphones (anything, just wired, and not coming out of the speakers to take the load off the DSP feedback cancelling). So, prolly $150 total? Point being, if you use just a wired mic and headphones of any quality, you're loads ahead in sound quality of those using the built-in mic and speakers on their laptop (or worse, their phone).

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#133

Post by mnw21cam »

jrickert wrote: post #126
mnw21cam wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a HDMI->USB video capture card, and tried to use it with my DSLR camera. It works fine in Teams, but not in Zoom. And that's because Teams selects a reasonable capture resolution that matches the 16:9 aspect ratio image produced by my camera's HDMI output at 1080p. Zoom selects the lowest possible resolution, which is 640x480, which makes me look squished. There is no setting in the Zoom interface that lets…

If you haven't, try going into your video settings on Zoom and selecting "Enable HD". This solution has fixed the aspect ratio problem you're describing for my company's customers in almost every case.

No, "Enable HD" does absolutely nothing.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#134

Post by aidenn0 »

corysama wrote: post #15

Different article from a month ago “Why can’t you buy a good web cam?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504771 Lots of points. Big one being that the market is bifurcated into: 1. People who just want the minimum as cheap as possible. 2. People willing to pay enough to buy a mirrorless photo camera and plug it in as a web cam when they need it.

Except The cameras from today's article go up to $200 MSRP.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#135

Post by clairity »

ska wrote: post #117
clairity wrote: post #88

front-facing cameras (i.e., webcams) are unnecessary on a laptop, tablet, or phone. manufacturers should remove them in favor of better supporting dedicated equipment, since they'll never be 'good enough' when video quality actually matters. video calls have been part of the futurism canon for at least 100 years, but they still have little utility beyond a simple phone call (or even text messages in many cases). they…

> but they still have little utility beyond a simple phone call We've collectively been running a huge experiment for the last year that has pretty conclusively proven this hypothesis false.

an unsupported assertion is not conclusive proof. we’ve seen that people have been trying to substitute in-person meetings with video calls, but that doesn’t prove any additional utility beyond a conference call.

even in educational or therapy/coaching situations, a recorded instructional video accompanied by a phone checkin likely has better outcomes than video chats.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#136

Post by mikestew »

josephg wrote: post #33
llampx wrote: post #23

I also noticed fairly early on, that phone cameras were improving by leaps and bounds, while laptop webcams and USB webcams seemed to be at a standstill, image-quality wise. I don't know why that is, but even Apple would seemingly rather shave 50 cents off the BOM by speccing a 720p Facetime camera in their $3000 Macbook Pros, and trying to make up the difference with software, like with the new M1 Macs that have bet…

> even Apple would seemingly rather shave 50 cents off the BOM by speccing a 720p Facetime camera in their $3000 Macbook Pros The reason I've heard is that the macbook display assembly simply doesn't have the depth to house a decent camera. The camera bump in phones exists for a reason - and phones are already way fatter than macbook displays. I have no idea if thats true though.

I've got a late 2019 iMac, and it's got the same piece-of-shit camera that the MBPs do. I think (without looking it up) recent iMacs bumped the specs. It is one of my few disappointments with this machine. OTOH, my workplace doesn't use cameras on online meetings. My musical jam group does, though. And I paid about $3K for this machine, so it shouldn't even be a discussion.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#137

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

tantalor wrote: post #118
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #109

Just the other day a user in my problem validation platform posted 'Make entry level webcam better'[1], the main gripe being 10 year old Logitech C270 still being sold at a higher price while improvements in smartphone cameras are being made every 6 months. Posts like these seems to confirm that there's a real need gap for a good quality webcam. Any of you working on solving this? or have ideas? [1] https://needgap.c…

What is a "problem validation platform"?

A place where people who face problem needing commercial solution, makers who are solving/want to solve such problems can participate in constructive discussions to make products which people want.

Problems are the first class citizen at needgap[1] as problems are something which exists now unlike an startup idea which becomes real only when executed and a startup could be made out of it.

If you're interested in why I had to create it, I've detailed it in 'Startup ideas vs Problems'[2].

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/5-needgap-submit-problems-for-s...

[2]https://hitstartup.com/startup-ideas-vs-problems/

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#138

Post by aidenn0 »

azatris wrote: post #75
AstralStorm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain old RTMP stream with h.265 inside probably. The problem is that nobody uses this for streaming because h.265 encoding is expensive even for hardware encoders in GPU. So to satisfice, use h.264 at good bitrate. Over 80 Mbit should be fine ;)

How would that work? Which application supports it? I don't know of a native way to do this.

VLC? OBS?

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#139

Post by analog31 »

llampx wrote: post #23

I also noticed fairly early on, that phone cameras were improving by leaps and bounds, while laptop webcams and USB webcams seemed to be at a standstill, image-quality wise. I don't know why that is, but even Apple would seemingly rather shave 50 cents off the BOM by speccing a 720p Facetime camera in their $3000 Macbook Pros, and trying to make up the difference with software, like with the new M1 Macs that have bet…

In my view, phone cameras are used for photography, in addition to conferencing. So they need to be better quality for that use. Nobody takes pictures of their outdoor adventure, or an image of a document, with a laptop camera.

Well, some people do. My kids were in the youth orchestra, and they had to issue a rule that parents are not allowed to hold an iPad up in the air for the entire duration of the concert.

Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough

#140

Post by rossjudson »

sebmellen wrote: post #46
janandonly wrote: post #16

Although this blog is written by someone with a financial incentive, it seems well thought out. The comparison is reasonable in that it compares “the best” webcam (a Logitec c930, according to https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-webcams/ ) with an iPhone using their software. I don't care if this is an “advertorial” or not, I'm going to test this software because my webcam sucks as well.

If you have a mirrorless or DSLR camera lying around, try this first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870161 . It might end up saving you money!

I use a Nikon D610 through a camlink 4k, and then a movo um700 for audio. The camlink 4k firmware has a bug (it reports modes it does not support), so I have a small workaround in place on Linux for that.

Overall quality of everything is very high. Does it save money? I guess I already had the camera.

Is it a good idea to broadcast myself at that level of quality? Probably not ;)

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