Unfortunately there aren't any FOSS solutions for using an android phone as a webcam.
Webcams aren't good enough
361–370 of 610 posts
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#362There are good USB cameras, just not a the price point reviewed here. For personal use (sitting in front of a normal display at a desk), I strongly recommend and use https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/one/ . It's a device you likely use every day. Spend the money, get setup once, and move on.
Nearly $500. Oof.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#363I'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 bought a Logitech C925E and was expecting a decent camera experience.
It is not a decent camera.
Huge upvote for Camo! Even an old iPhone 6S is far better than any Webcam I've ever experienced!
That Apple shipped a terrible camera in their new Display is baffling!
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy a Camo lifetime license for $80 USD.
Is that a lifetime of upgrades or is it merely a perpetual license that doesn't stop working simply because your subscription ran out?
I am not sure. I looked for an answer but didn't see anything. It appears to behave like a perpetual subscription (meaning free upgrades) but I think you would have to contact the customer support team at the company to get the answers.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#365Yeah I always wonder.. Why don't they put those cams they put in phones in a webcam?? Sure they're expensive but so are some webcams. And $200-300 buys you a great compact photo cam. So why not a webcam that needs less components?
It's not even just the sensors, the optics totally suck as well. Even the top webcams often have a huge 'fake lens' that's actually just flat glass and being it is just the usual tiny lens. The logitech stream does this, for example. It looks impressive but it's still the same crap in prettier plastic.
I kinda had to laugh at that odd iPhone clip they introduced at Apple's last keynote. It's basically an admission that their webcams suck.
I know some colleagues that use their phones as cam and while the quality is great it's also super annoying not being able to use your phone when a text comes in or something. I know Apple has some built in tricks to handle that stuff on a Mac but for work I don't always use one (and I don't have an iPhone). So I never use my phone for this. I'd spend 200-300 bucks on a great webcam though. It's just that right now there aren't any.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#366Earlier 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…
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…
The physics of optics are still a hard problem and laptop screens have less room which is why the suck.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#367This article was written from the perspective of someone who has not kept up with the webcam market at all and judging by the current state of the comments here, neither has anyone else. Products like the Dell WB7022 and the Elgato Facecam blow the previous generation out of the water, and the Dell is even microphone-free, which I much prefer to the compromised microphones jammed into most cheap models. The Dell model is also bog-standard UVC compliant, unless you want to play with face-tracking or HDR modes; these for some reason require a Windows program to toggle, instead of being exposed as UVC settings. The Elgato model is entirely proprietary.
As much as I like the WB7022, it turns out that nobody notices or cares if I hop on a meeting on my wife's computer with her Logitech c922; at the end of the day and for the majority of business needs the cost/quality cusp has been nailed for about a decade, and I don't predict a major shift toward higher quality any time soon. If you need to produce high-quality video, a webcam will never be enough, and if you don't need to shoot a movie, webcams have been fine for a long time. Even in the linked article, all the criticism is from the owner of the webcams, with strong opinions about photography. Not one iota of attention or interest has been paid to whether anyone on the other end of the meeting even notices.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#368I'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…
> A big reason there hasn't been innovation is that the space doesn't attract entrepreneurs (because hardware is viewed as hard) or investors (because hardware is viewed as hard).
Why though? It's all off the shelf stuff. If it's in phones you can put it in your product.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#369I first saw this article years ago, and I'm glad to see it has been updated with some more modern webcams. I'm also sad to see that the state of the art in this space hasn't changed much for webcams, especially on the Mac. I do have an older iPhone 7 that I could put to use like this, but I'm starting to become convinced that maybe I actually do need to buy a somewhat newer iPhone device with multiple lenses, and use…
As a longtime, happy user of an iPhone 6S (on my third battery, second screen, and second charging port), I am curious as to why you consider the iPhone 7 to be obsolete for personal use. I know that later models have better screens, cameras, processors, etc., but I have a crisp Retina display and all functionality I use seems fine.
The entire reason why I dumped my iPhone 7 is that it can't keep up with the current version of iOS, and I needed something that could. So, I'd always be stuck on a device with a back rev version of iOS, and after a short while, security patches would stop being back ported.
Moreover, my employer requires that I use a device that is running the latest version of iOS and is fully patched, so the iPhone 7 is now simply a non-starter.
As for using it as a webcam, the camera and other hardware is old enough that I don't think I'd like it for that use, either.
So, it'll sit in a closet or on a shelf until I decide what to do with it, along with all the other old iPhones I have, going all the way back to the original iPhone.
Re: Webcams aren't good enough
#370I'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…
Does the software you need to configure the camera (and run color calibration) run on Linux?