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Comment by dreamercz | Hacker News Reader

I have the Logitech C920 webcam the post mentions. The white balance truly is all over the place, especially if you don't have great lightning setup.

I ended up adjusting the image manually with v4l2-ctl (see for example http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/v4l2-ctl.1.h...) I also pointed my warm white light desk lamp towards the wall behind my desk and bounce a bit of light back on my face off the wall.

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I also have a C920: it's fairly infamous for the "Smurf effect", where it tends to make everything look unnaturally blue. Setting the "white_balance_temperature" setting manually improves this situation substantially! Depending on your OS, you might have to first set a "white_balance_temperature_auto" to "off" and then set a "white_balance_temperature" in Kelvin. [In OpenBSD, we recently added this ability, but conflated the two controls into one. YMMV will vary by OS!]

I'm glad to see others pointing this out. Compared to the build-in webcam on my MacBook Pro, the C920 is much sharper, but I look like a ghost most of the time. And Logitech's software leaves a lot to be desired; at one point, it was bundled in with their gaming software package and asks for lots of extra permissions to control my computer that I don't need for the webcam.

If there is a better thirty-party program out there for macOS, I would love that.

I can adjust the white balance with my Elgato key light and that seems to work pretty well.

The Logitech C920 is IMO a nice compromise. It's as high quality as you need for most purposes and it doesn't take up the desk real estate of a dedicated camera. It's also easier to have your eyes closer to the slides you're presenting or the video of the person you're speaking with.

For my Mac, I find that EpocCam on my iPod Touch (and iPhone) is very good as a webcam, especially in low light. For mounting it, this looks good: SHAWE Phone Holder Bed Gooseneck Mount

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