71–80 of 499 posts
"...the A6400 seems to be slightly better as a webcam." Contact me if you want to buy mine! I bought mine at the start of quarantine for streaming live video at my local church but haven't really used it much since.
Yes, please! Twitter or email? My gmail is my username.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned using a teleprompter yet. You can pick one up for around $100 and when combined with a little 7" monitor (another $100) attached to your computer, creates a nice setup for zoom calls where you can look directly at your partner. Also doubles as a great talking head setup for video production.
Even the "good" webcams (like the Elgato FaceCam and Logi Brio) have tiny sensors with small lenses. And iPhones (with Reincubate Camo) have bigger but still relatively tiny sensors.
Pair an APS-C sensor with a ~24mm f/2 lens, with no controls; just a USB connection. This would barely be bigger than the lens itself (think double the size of Apple's old iSight).
I'd easily pay $400 or more for this just to avoid messing around with mirrorless cameras and trying to mount them and use their drivers or HDMI capture USB interfaces.
C/CS/D mounts are for CCTV camera so you can find new and used lens for cheap. They will not fix a cheap/bad sensor, but they will definitely get you extra flexibility in what kind of framing/shot you can do.
Works nearly flawlessly. Sometimes Google meet refuses to pick up the video until I unplug but that might have to do more with the handshake between my back and my TB3 dock.
Could somebody do an ELI5 on why some phones have very good cameras but for some reason there's no standalone USB version of them?
Phone cameras are very good but owing much of it to the DSP and software. An iPhone camera will not produce iPhone quality photos without the chipset and OS.
One thing that I’ve been trying to educate my colleagues about (including the A/V folks!) is that one can bypass the need to fiddle with drivers by using a generic hardware HDMI -> USB video conversion stick utilizing the mirrorless/DSLR’s HDMI output. It’ll mount as a generic video input that Zoom/Teams/OBS can use. You can find these for $40-$100 and it allows one to switch out hardware brands at will without insta…
What I've found is that by USB charging and using HDMI out, it's good for ~2.5 hours of streaming, which I've only ever hit once as a limit.
there's a newer Sony in the same line (the ZV-E10) but it moved the ports to the other side of the camera, so if you flick the LCD round so you can see it, the cables are in the way...
I cannot wait until cameras work behind the screen and can be positioned right in the center but for now, the only option I found was something called Center Cam that mounts a small lense on a skinny support that can be positioned over the screen, somewhat unobtrusively.
I am a Camo user too and it's incredible but having the phone off to one side in a tripod or mount exacerbates the "here's (not) looking at you" issue.
I started a project that uses Camo and suspends the phone upside down from the top of the screen via a 3D printed mount. Then, an app on the phone, mirrors the portion of the screen that is covered by the phone. Not perfect (or even close) and it means you need to use the lower quality front facing camera but it fun to dabble.
But isn't running a camera as a Webcam actually bad for the battery, especially if you plan to use that camera also for trips?
Mirrorless cameras can be powered by USB, either Micro or C depending on model. The batteries have a built-in BMS so leaving the camera plugged in won't harm them.
Some mirrorless aren't thermally compatible with running full video on battery for long periods, this is worth researching before purchase, but for the ones which are it's not going to damage the battery to run off of it.
There's no motive to do so with a desktop setup.