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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#341

Post by lexx »

pintxo wrote: 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.

For those that want to make their canon work in linux, check this guide

https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/canon-dslr-webcam-debian...

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#342

Post by LeFantome »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #234
Beltalowda wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Lumina work on Linux? I can't really find anything about it (there is also a Lumina Desktop Environment for Linux it seems), and while it says "Lumina is compatible with Windows and Macintosh machine" this can mean "we don't directly support Linux, but it should work" (like Logitech), or it can mean "we have specialized drivers/software that only work on Windows and macOS".

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…

If there are selling undifferentiated hardware supported by smart / magic software, they need to block people from running their fancy software on somebody else’s cheap hardware.

If they want to get paid for the magic, it will be more expensive to buy hardware from them than it is to buy equivalent hardware elsewhere. How do they get you to buy their product?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#343

Post by dharma1 »

modeless wrote: post #269
rlei wrote: post #171

I'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…

> 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 expect mobile phone cameras to kill webcams. All the innovation happens there and when people already have something getting closer to dSLR quality each year, why invest in a specialised webcam?

Apple just needs to bake webcam sharing/remote camera control into iOS and come up with a nice attachment for the phone that works with MacBooks and displays so you don’t have to look at the camera at a weird angle.

Maybe some magsafe sticker behind the display so you can snap your phone to the back of the display easily, with the main rear cameras pointing at you above the display

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#344

Post by adrusi »

modeless wrote: post #269
rlei wrote: post #171

I'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…

> 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…

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 processing tricks, and you'll blow almost any webcam on the market today.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#345

Post by adrusi »

dharma1 wrote: post #343
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 expect mobile phone cameras to kill webcams. All the innovation happens there and when people already have something getting closer to dSLR quality each year, why invest in a specialised webcam? Apple just needs to bake webcam sharing/remote camera control into iOS and come up with a nice attachment for the phone that works with MacBooks and displays so you don’t have to look at the camera at a weird angle. Maybe s…

They announced just this at WWDC a couple weeks ago.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#346

Post by SimianLogic »

rlei wrote: post #171

I'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…

I purchased and returned a Lumina in January. I was hoping it was "good enough" to replace my current setup (Fujifilm X100f with a battery blank and Elgato camlink) and free up my family camera to do family camera stuff again.

It was better than the built-in camera on my gaming laptop, but nowhere close to what I was expecting (even moreso because I was on Windows). More "okay-to-good webcam" than just "good" quality without pairing that word with "webcam." I'm on the waitlist for the Opal C1 and will give that a shot, but honestly might spring for the next-gen Fuji and turn mine into a permanent webcam (too bad my first generation X100 isn't supported by their webcam software update).

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#347

Post by bronco21016 »

theelous3 wrote: post #279
rlei wrote: post #171

I'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…

> that would be like if Apple stopped releasing new phones after the iPhone 4S (launched 2012), and it remained the bestselling phone through now. If I can be a bit cheeky - this sounds like exactly the kind of frankly ridiculous comparison a founder would make about their product alright. The reality is - nobody really cares that much . Whatever image you record is going to be gigga-smashed by whatever application y…

Completely agree with you on audio. I’m not entirely certain it’s solvable without cultural norms changing. Even the absolute best noise reduction systems cannot work in every environment and echo cancellation always has enough delay to cause people to “step” on each other. It’s just physics and propagation of sound waves.

At a minimum, normalizing the use of in/on ear audio needs to become the norm. Echo cancellation makes most “speakerphone” setups unbearable in my opinion.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#348

Post by 988747 »

jrk wrote: post #117
logifail wrote: post #48

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,…

Lighting and composition can do a lot to compensate for a weak camera, but read the post: this isn’t saying “Zoom video looks bad [potentially because of bad lighting and composition],” it’s saying “even high-end webcams are enormously worse than even old, low-end/front-facing cell phone cameras in the same conditions, and it’s not getting better.” So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps. But this post…

One thing to remember about lightning: take your computer monitor into account :)

I have a bright (600 cd HDR) 32-inch monitor. I did a live streaming once (kind of online training) - the lightning was good most of the time, but when I tried to share some bright content on my screen (like a file, or web page with white background) the monitor would be so bright that my whole face would glow like a full moon :). I think next time I will use dark mode for all apps, or reduce screen brightness to minimum.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#349

Post by LAC-Tech »

vhanda wrote: post #340
LAC-Tech wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but then you can't share your screen, and you can't see the call participants because the android screen is facing away from you.

I think they meant to buy an extra android phone and use that as a webcam.

I guess I don't understand the mechanism where by you use an android phone as an external webcam. Guess I never tried just plugging it in via usb and seeing if my OS picked it up...

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#350

Post by viraptor »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #295
viraptor wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm half assuming they do something special, half responding to the comment which describes them as a hardware company. But yes, ideally a webcam should have the basic functionality available just by plugging it in, no special software needed.
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