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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#151

There is a reason that for hundreds of years painters and (later) photographers have preferred working in spaces with North-facing windows[0], and that is because it's a simple way of ensuring neutral, even light. My home office is (by design) in a room with one North-facing window. I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my webcam feed is. I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant,…

However, using a better camera is easier than remodeling your house.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#152
post #27
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.

Would it not overheat after some time?

Some models definitely overheat. Some models also don’t have clean HDMI output.

Basically, you can’t just buy a random mirrorless or SLR camera and hope it works. You have to pick from a smaller list of known-good setups.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OBS camera won’t work in many MacOS programs nor will GoPro Webcam. It should be noted that the M1 MacBook Pro has a camera which is noticeably better than it used to be.

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.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#154
This makes me wonder whether there's some relatively simple configuration of cameras that can be used to give a basic 3-d type experience. Nothing crazy like the oculus, but maybe something where a computer can use head tracking so that as you move your head, you see a little bit around the other person's face so it feels a little more lifelike.

I assume this would only be relevant for the primary speaker, of course.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#156
What do other folks think about the impending ability to use an iPhone as the camera for your Mac, with bokeh/blurring built in?

One thing I wonder about is whether the largest phones will be too heavy, especially for laptops that were built before this capability was anticipated.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such things.

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?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#159
If you want a great webcam, then you can buy something like a Canon m50 mirrorless dslr or wire up your phone iphone (or samsung!) to you Pc. Eitherway you will end up spending close to $1000. Standalone webcam's just dont have the CPU or firmware to create great pictures.

The courious thing for me is why the Webcam on my Mac m1 so bad, when you know the hardware/firmware involved is so closely related to the hardware in the iphone

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