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Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

opalcamera.com

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Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#21

Post by solardev »

johndough wrote: post #14

USB 2.0 at 200 MBps sounds like a serious limitation. 1080P is of course more than sufficient for the average video conference, but it seems kind of wasteful to use a 48MP sensor and then discarding most of the information, followed by lossy compression.

A large sensor isn't just for raw megapixels (which are arguably kinda useless in a video conference where most people are tiny parts of the gallery anyway), but the image quality and light sensitivity and such should all be a lot better. It's better that they use the large sensor and onboard signal processing to interpolate a denoise a good 1080p frame than the opposite -- most webcams cram too many pixels into a tiny sensor and give you a large but shitty video. Many good cell phone cameras do the same thing (start with an oversized 48MP sensor, but interpolate it to give you a high-quality 12MP one; only a few let you access the raw unprocessed 48MP stream).

200 Mbps should be more than enough to stream good quality video. YouTube suggests 40 Mbps for 4k@60Hz (compressed) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#22

Post by jstummbillig »

berbec wrote: post #5

What is the market for this product? I can't see their being enough people who a. have a laptop without a camera/need a better camera b. are willing to lug this thing around and c. are willing to pay $200. How is web design this bad acceptable? It's insanely slow, annoying to read and impossible to navigate.

I think the visual and web design is fairly great, felt very appealing to me. It's completely smooth and immersive on my 2020 MB Air (but I can see why it might suffer on other devices and screens sizes).

The product is obviously somewhere in the niceties bucket; no one needs this, but I am happy it exists. It gives me the warm and fuzzy feeling only something thoughtfully designed does.

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#24

Post by solardev »

Am I just really old, or is this web design atrocious...?

I know HN skews traditionalist anyway, but even here, a site this bad stands out.

I feel like normally we argue about user-invisible stuff like JS frameworks and analytics and tracking, but in this case it's a very in-your-face design meant to subvert all the common UX best practices in favor of something chic.

Does anyone like this? (Who is supposed to?) I can't tell anymore if I'm just old-fashioned and grumpy, and totally out of touch with modern preferences, or if this is just... universally bad.

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#26

Post by solardev »

heeton wrote: post #18

I could never recommend this. I own a C1 and it's completely ruined by terrible software. On MacOS (various versions, on M1 and now M3), it stops randomly, needs regular reconnecting. I'm on an old version of the app because the new version doesn't even work at all (hard freeze after an hour). Countless examples from forums and elsewhere of the same issues. Shame, because the hardware is cool.

Thanks for sharing this! This is exactly what I was afraid of -- that this might be a company focused on the "shiny" and not the polish. The website was a big red flag for me, but most reviews don't get into the nitty-gritty of stuff like that.

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#27

Post by sottol »

solardev wrote: post #24

Am I just really old, or is this web design atrocious...? I know HN skews traditionalist anyway, but even here, a site this bad stands out. I feel like normally we argue about user-invisible stuff like JS frameworks and analytics and tracking, but in this case it's a very in-your-face design meant to subvert all the common UX best practices in favor of something chic. Does anyone like this? (Who is supposed to?) I ca…

Has a Teenage Engineering vibe imo, which is a fan-favorite here.

https://teenage.engineering/

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#28

Post by sebtron »

solardev wrote: post #24

Am I just really old, or is this web design atrocious...? I know HN skews traditionalist anyway, but even here, a site this bad stands out. I feel like normally we argue about user-invisible stuff like JS frameworks and analytics and tracking, but in this case it's a very in-your-face design meant to subvert all the common UX best practices in favor of something chic. Does anyone like this? (Who is supposed to?) I ca…

Honestly, I can't tell.

Literally: I clicked on the link and all I could see was a white dot blinking on a black background. After about 20 seconds I gave up.

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#29

Post by [deleted] »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #8

If the microphone can do what they say (only listen in that immediate area) then that's really cool. (Big if - I believe you can filter by angle, but my understanding of physics precludes filtering by distance; someone please correct me if I'm ignorant) The mute button is a good idea - I strongly prefer having a nice dedicated button, though in my case it's on the headset - but that placement seems guaranteed to put…

[deleted]

Re: Opal Tadpole – A webcam for laptops

#30

Post by dochtman »

heeton wrote: post #18

I could never recommend this. I own a C1 and it's completely ruined by terrible software. On MacOS (various versions, on M1 and now M3), it stops randomly, needs regular reconnecting. I'm on an old version of the app because the new version doesn't even work at all (hard freeze after an hour). Countless examples from forums and elsewhere of the same issues. Shame, because the hardware is cool.

I got a C1 too and apart from the crap software it also seemed like the camera isn’t actually (significantly) better than the MacBook Pro (M1) camera anyway.
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