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Webcams aren't good enough

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#371

Post by gnicholas »

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…

How do you think the market will be impacted by Apple's recently-announced feature, which lets people use their iPhones as webcams?

I was considering getting a webcam, but when I saw this announcement I decided to wait and see how Apple's implementation works.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#372

Post by bborud »

I wish webcam manufacturers would focus on sensors and optics instead of rubbing lipstick all over low quality hardware with an undeniable porcine quality.

Fixing it with AI is nonsense. Fashionable nonsense but still nonsense.

I have spent lots of money on various webcams. Including cameras that promise “AI”. The truth is not even my $1000 “AI” webcam gets close to my aging iPhone 7. As a video conferencing camera it is an over-priced, over hyped-piece of junk. The damn thing can’t even do basic white balance and has no control to set it because “it is an AI camera”. I either look like I’m about to die or as if I have a sunburn. And after countless firmware upgrades, it is still horrible. The expensive camera has one thing going for it though: it has decent microphones. That’s actually more important than good video.

To anyone who makes AI webcams: please give me manual controls and focus on image quality instead of marketing. Don’t be clever. Hire someone who obsesses over image quality and is a decent photographer to judge the visuals. And put a good microphone system in the thing.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#373

Post by GekkePrutser »

newsclues wrote: post #366
adrusi wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True but this argument doesn't work for desktop webcams which have as much space as they want (even a lot more than in a phone)

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#374

Post by lucb1e »

OJFord wrote: post #59
kyriakos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.

I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.

I'd love to hear a sample of a British accent where everything sounds like Samoa or similar! :D

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#375

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

> 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

You do realise they just did exactly this, right? :)

But look at it and see why it doesn't really work.. It's an awful contraption, and your phone is tied up for the duration. And I doubt it will work well with every case either.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#376

Post by Fauntleroy »

logifail wrote: post #191
bjourne wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that even a shitty old cell phone handily beats a "mid-range" C920 webcam. Yes, lighting conditions are important to photography, but, as the author demonstrates, cell phone cameras are better even in those scenarios. Furthermore, if you live in northern latitudes you get very little sunlight during the winter so a "window" is not a sufficient solution.

> Furthermore, if you live in northern latitudes you get very little sunlight during the winter so a "window" is not a sufficient solution Perhaps I wasn't clear: a North-facing window never gets direct sunlight, but doesn't matter because we're after neutral, even light . Certainly not "direct light", not even "lots of light". Just neutral, even light. It's worked for artists for centuries.

Man, he's just saying webcams are still shit, not that your pontification about light is wrong. Besides, how many of us get to choose the placement of our windows more easily than the camera we use?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#377

Post by bborud »

newsclues wrote: post #366
adrusi wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...and yet, my macbook pro camera produces a better image than my external webcam even though it is lower resolution.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#378

Post by GekkePrutser »

viraptor wrote: post #267
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.…

The postprocessing should be done in the cam though, IMO.. And it should just give the result back ideally in a standard format.

But I would prefer better optics and sensors over AI stuff like many others have mentioned. When you have good video you have much less need to fiddle with it.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#379

Post by harha »

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…

Agree, the flat and tiny webcams aren’t really necessary at home or in the home office and I don’t know anyone who carries even the smaller webcams around.

As long as it doesn’t look too bad, a larger lens and sensor would be perfectly fine (think of the original iSight camera, something like that would totally be acceptable) and I’d rather not have my computer be slowed down even further by the webcam doing some magic in the background.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#380

Post by GekkePrutser »

hgomersall wrote: post #202
savy91 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to try Obsbot meet, I recently switched to it and it's pretty decent on Linux

From the Obsbot site: "The OBSBOT Meet series hardware is able to work with both macOS and Linux, but we will not make the exclusive software for the Linux operating system."

Also, their website makes my browser grind to a halt, they must use some kind of weird video codec that's not accelerated.

If they make this crappy software for the web it doesn't instill a lot of confidence in their AI.

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