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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

The real reason is buried in the article:

You can’t buy a good webcam because the number of people willing to pay a lot of money for a high end webcam is very small.

At the lower end, people are satisfied with their built in laptop parts or a cheap webcam that sits on top of their monitor.

At the high end, people go down the rabbit hole of buying a do-everything mirrorless camera that they can use for so much more than just a webcam.

A high end webcam would have to be cheap enough that the first group doesn’t mind spending a bit more, but not so expensive that the enthusiast target audience just decides to buy a full-featured mirror less camera instead.

Granted, there is a lot of room for improvement in that budgetary middle ground, but how many people actually care? Common webcams actually perform decently when given proper lighting conditions. We’re not streaming high-bitrate 1080p H.265 on our 5-person Zoom calls. After compression and denoising the extra sharpness and low noise of a high end camera doesn’t add much benefit.

Enthusiasts are a difficult group to market to because they have extremely high expectations. They’d also rather spend weeks scouring the Internet for the perfect deal on a used mirrorless camera than to spend a dollar more than necessary to buy a high-end webcam.

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I'm just not sure I buy this...

The number of people willing to pay significant money for a high end webcam was very small. Now my parents and their friends are talking about better lighting and camera angles.

It seems like this industry is unusually ripe for a "better webcam" that "just works"

and unfortunately Amazon and Facebook's spy-on-you-all-the-time FaceTime call-style communication products are going to dominate, especially with that demographic.

Did somebody say iSight 2?

iSight was such a beautiful-looking product!

It's rather mind-blowing that back then its 640×480-pixel VGA resolution was considered good.

It wasnt just good, it was almost broadcast quality :) This was still a time of CIF 352x288/QVGA 320x240 webcams with interpolated 640x480 modes. "High-End" Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000 produced something like this https://secure40.securewebsession.com/mikeshardware.site.apl...

It's still good enough. 1080p or 4k is totally unnecessary for a Zoom meeting.

Right now they're talking about better lighting and camera angles. Will they still be interested in six months? In a year? There's a lot of uncertainty for any prospective manufacturer, they could spend a significant amount of money and time developing a product only to launch it into a world that never wants to do another zoom meeting again.

I worked as a freelance DOP and worked with cameras + lenses that coat more than a decent car.

And while there is certainly room for improvement with typical webcams: the problem is in many cases not the camera, but the conditions under which it operates. Low light, shooting against the light, smeared laptop lenses, weird angles (not eye level), weird perspective framing, bad combination of light and framerates, mixed light temperatures, low CRI lighting, etc. If you take an 40k€ Arri and a 20k€ Zeiss Prime and do all of the above the result will still look more or less crappy.

Making a good looking image that feels natural is work, and while the camera is an important cog in the machine, it alone won't do wonders. The whole physical space around the motive needs to be arranged the right way, light fixtures that can cost a ton as well are set up, a whole truckload of grip is placed etc.

IMO we will get photorealistic realtime avatars with cinematic lighting before we will get cameras that create better pictures on their own. Or the crappy webcam pictures are filtered in ways that make them look acceptable etc.

Making a good picture involves realising how somebody looks and how they want to be seen and get them closer to that goal, it is not something where one size fits all.

> And while there is certainly room for improvement with typical webcams: the problem is in many cases not the camera, but the conditions under which it operates. Low light, shooting against the light, smeared laptop lenses, weird angles (not eye level), weird perspective framing, bad combination of light and framerates, mixed light temperatures, low CRI lighting, etc. If you take an 40k€ Arri and a 20k€ Zeiss Prime and do all of the above the result will still look more or less crappy.

All this is true, yet the difference between a bad laptop webcam and a high-end phone front camera is huge.

A lot of work has been done on phone cameras to replace standalone cameras, but isn't half of the development investment there on the software side -- in addition to the hardware of the camera? (e.g. echoing GP's "crappy webcam pictures are filtered in ways that make them look acceptable etc" statement)

The problem is laptop lids are a lot thinner than smartphones and just don't have the depth to contain a decent optic. Apple have tried to mitigate this a bit in the new M1 machines using some computational photography to improve the image.

The Surface machines from Microsoft actually stand out in this regard. Because the brains of the machine are in the same section as the screen and camera, they are a lot thicker and can put in pretty decent camera modules.

My laptop lid is as thick as my smartphone. I think there is enough space. I think the technology from smart phones has not swept over to laptop lids yet.

What if the Smartphone camera cost $20, and the laptop camera cost $5 to manufacturer? Smart phones can maybe justify the extra $15, laptop makers cannot. If a laptop maker can't raise the price $15, it literally eats their profits.

Seriously? With laptops costing $1000+ I think they can afford to put in the $15 smartphone part from $300 smartphones in the higher end ones.

Or, you know, just sell one as a USB peripheral.

If they can't justify the price increase and it doesn't make then a cpear winner against the competition, the manufacturer will cut some corners to stay competitive. At scale, an expense increase of $15 per device is quite significant.

Generally agree but even Apple MacBooks stuck at 720p webcam, why? Apple products should be able to pay additional cost for such parts.

They are able to, but being able to shave a couple of cents on it gives them a massive return while most consumers don't complain, and their competitors aren't offering anything better.

I believe they make 3-5% margin for a $30-$50 profit on the hardware in that example. They literally cannot afford that extra $15 unless they raise the price $15 and then they have to worry about whether a value conscious buyer buys their slightly cheaper alternative.

Keeping in mind this is for a feature that most people actually don't care about.

Seriously.

Take that $15 and apply to 8 other things. The memory. The speaker. The keyboard. Your $500 laptop is now $600. Your competitor is still $500. You lose.

That is why I said high end laptop...

We're not talking about a budget $500 laptop. My laptop cost me over $1500 and its camera sucks. I did not shop based on price; I shopped based on specs and features.

$10 saved is $10 saved. That's how you increase margins, right?

If you have a decent thickness laptop lid and still have a crappy built in webcam, that’s just straight up nickel and dimming by the manufacturer.

But why can't I buy an external webcam, where that isn't an issue, with the same quality as a smartphone camera?

The market for dedicated external webcams is a little sparse because most people don't want to have more peripherals.

There's probably a good opportunity for home office external displays to incorporate smartphone cameras, studio mikes, and maybe even lighting elements to help people look good while working from home.

Since COVID the webcam market has exploded. Logitech had to significantly ramp up production due to increase in demand back in April. It’s not just remote work, but also aspiring content creators.

> Since COVID the webcam market has exploded.

companies that are crushed by demand for existing products, and dealing with covid-related supply chain issues, and long-term uncertainty about demand aren't going to have a lot of luck getting a new high-end product out in <9 months.

among other reasons, getting these sorts of things made usually requires some travel by the engineers to the manufacturing/assembly facility to sort out problems.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a Chinese company to do it, as they’re fully open.

and yet, they will not.

Wouldn’t a smartphone work for you then ?

it might need a mount to be properly positionned, but that would be the only IRL hurdle. On the software front I don’t know how good the current options are, but fixing bugs should be doable.

It probably would, and there are apps to do exactly this. Mounts are cheap enough to be reasonable, though there aren't many specialized for this yet.

Personally I don't think they'll even take half of this market - it means you can't fiddle with your phone while on a call.

I tried going this route a few weeks ago. There's a few pretty big problems with current phone-based solutions:

- You need to fiddle with your phone (which is probably mounted to a monitor?) any time you want to turn on your webcam

- There's a perceptible lag on the final video, not ideal

- Phone needs an external power source, charging-over-USB usually isn't enough to power a phone with an always-on camera

- The phone will get hot, as it's not designed to run camera constantly

- For Android, your best option is to stream video over USB, which means enabling ADB and developer settings, which is inherently insecure. It also makes the charging problem above trickier, as phones usually only have the one port.

Honestly the best phone-based solution right now is to join the meeting twice - once on your personal phone for sending video, and once on your computer for sending/receiving audio/screenshares.

I mentioned this before, but why not have a camera bump on the outside of laptops? Almost all modern smartphones have a camera bump.

I Skype with family a couple of times a week. I'd gladly pay another $100-200 for a better integrated webcam.

People walk around taking pictures and video with their phone. No one walks around with their laptop open taking pictures or filming the kids on the tobogganing hill.

Now with everyone working remotely I could see a quality demand happening but no where near the interest in phone cams.

Good point. Speaking of phone cameras...

I've had success using my iPhone for video capture via OBS. The setup was a bit fiddly, but still only took an hour-ish to try this approach by downloading and installing OBS, figuring out I needed a virtualcam plugin, finding it and fiddling w config, creating a dirt-simple "scene", and enabling it for use in Zoom. This is on an iPhone X (iOS 14.2), and Catalina (macOS 10.15.7).

> Making a good picture involves realising how somebody looks and how they want to be seen and get them closer to that goal, it is not something where one size fits all.

Incidentally the same is true for audio: You can get what easily passes as "studio level" audio quality out of a 20$ microphone and free processing plugins these days – as long as someone or something is making the right operational choices during recording and processing.

Making good choices in absence of right answers is the hard thing about creative work.

Freelance videographer and cam-op here. Your Arri experience is skewing your perspective. Any recent highly regarded DSLR will be significantly better in low light, intelligently apply both sharpening and noise reduction, and do so with auto focus in a package that weighs less than your Zeiss Prime. I AC for an Alexa Mini LF shooter, and it's interested to see just how far divergent evolution has got in this regard. I wouldn't want to shoot a movie on a DSLR - but they (and of course cell phone camera & smart processing) are significantly better for many applications that the best cinema cameras in the world. Speaking to the original article - you'll absolutely smash standard laptop, or webcam quality, evening in god awful lighting conditions on say a GH5 or A7siii .

Not OP but sitting the presenter in front of a north facing window, positioning the laptop camera at eye level and giving them a well adjusted $70 mic provides an improvement over any badly positioned camera in mixed color temperature silhouetted lighting situation.

Why north facing window? I have a choice of southwest or northeast facing windows to put my office- which should I pick?

The one that does not get direct sunlight. North guarantees a diffused and somewhat constant illumination.

I think "AC" here is a verbification of "assistant camera" [1], a role in professional (movie) photography.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_puller#:~:text=A%20foc....

I'm a colorist and have to clean up footage from everything from cellphones (a lot recently with the pandemic), gopros, and dslrs to alexas, phantoms, 35mm, and even IMAX footage. Trust me when I say that I've seen it all.

Short answer is you're wrong, even the latest dslrs are miles and miles from those high end solution in nearly all scenarios (discounting ultra ISO lightless shooting that no one does for anything beyond Vimeo demo reels). DSLR footage looks similar to the untrained eye but falls apart in even moderately difficult situations even when shot with off camera recorders costing thousands to clean video videos, which invalidates your point anyway.

The same is true for the mid tier solutions like blackmagic pocket or ursa. I can get the footage to cut seamlessly with an Alexa, but it's much more work to make it look good and has deal breaker technical issues in many more pressing scenarios.

If you could elaborate on that you'd definitely have a interested audience - of at least one

Two

There are non-trivial workflow issues, but The Possession of Hannah Grace was shot on a Sony A7 SII for example. Things have definitely moved in the last couple of years.

I'm going to have to argue my point here... We're talking about different things. If you're talking about footage flexibility and colour fidelity - absolutely you'll get much better results in good lighting on an Arri or DSMC2 RED....

For literally anything else you might be concerned about - i.e.: what most people will care about when shooting, the image out of a DSLR is infinitely better. I'm not addressing better to grade, since obviously it's both compressed and stored at much lower bit depth and file size (these are all good things in a home context). I'm talking about sharpness, autofocus, and low light performance (including colour accuracy in extreme low light). These are inarguably better on DSLR. For heavens sake you can get reasonable footage out of an A7Siii at 12,800 ISO.

You're looking through the wrong end of the telescope here - i.e.: accuracy and manipulability in a situation with a post budget and crew. I'm speaking to appropriateness for real time streaming and home recording with zero post. You literally can't get HDMI out of an ARRI. It's completely inappropriate for this purpose.

So to make a crude example - even if you could set up the Arri for this purpose - streaming in Fuji Eterna or Sony S-Cinetone from home will look infinitely better than unprocessed Rec.9 from the Arri, for 99% of purposes.

We're talking about completely different things. You're like an F1 driver mocking the suspension and ABS on a family saloon. No one should ever drive your F1 on the road, whatever its obvious benefits for the specific situations it's perfect in. For one thing it costs multiple times the price of the best possible family car. For another it requires a trained crew. And so on...

I have been bemused and disappointed that with all the high-end talent in Hollywood, there has been such a long-term tolerance for the trope of crappy sound and badly-lit faces that we continue to see on remote feeds from the "homes of the stars." I have come to believe that directors think the audience wants to see the talent are "roughing it".

Actors aren't camera people, or sound or lighting techs. People who do that stuff make good money doing it because it's actually quite difficult to do well.

true, but if a studio "sends out" an actor to promote a new million dollar movie they surely can send some decent equipment and someone to set it up to that stars home? (or at least have a remote session) Seems like a small price to pay. But maybe its true what other comments mentioned and people want or prefer that amateur look.

Sure, if they want to risk people's health so that an actor can look better during an interview, they can definitely send a makeup specialist and a lighting/sound crew and a camera guy to set everything up in the actor's home, and then send them back to take everything down after the interview is over.

But since nobody cares that actor's aren't wearing makeup at home right now, they could just do the safe thing and not do any of that and the actor can do the interview the way they normally appear in real life. Indeed, it may actually be worse PR to have the actor have a professional studio setup in their home, because then people may ask why the studio risked the health of so many people for something so unnecessary.

TV stations did have crew set up home studios for anchors and weatherpeeps, complete with remote links to the studios video in-feed, but the difference is that anchors and weatherpeeps will be on the air almost every day, for hours at a time.

Cinéma vérité

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cin%C3%A9ma_v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9

Making a good looking image that feels natural is work, and while the camera is an important cog in the machine, it alone won't do wonders.

A agree with your observations. Is photography 101: you need good light and clean gear.

I was one of 16 people on a videoconference yesterday. We all have the same MacBook Pros, so all the same cameras. Some people looked awesome. Some people looked awful.

How do you know some of your coworkers haven't upgraded their setup on personal equipment? Or optimized their lighting setups?

Interesting point - it’s a very similar situation for audio. Most people are fine with very low quality headphones or speakers. You can get a major improvement with desktop powered monitors that cost $50-$200. You can spend much more for higher quality speakers, but they’ll be limited by the acoustic environment. You really have to put more effort into wall treatments, seating position, and speaker placement before further improvements in the electronic signal chain will be noticeable.

What is DOP?

I assume Director of Photography.

I was amazed looking on Amazon you can get ring lights for $20 bucks dedicated for phones, webcams etc. Makes a huge difference.

For me though its the audio. I hate listening to people on speaker so much. Get a headset or at least a good mic, it isn't expensive.

Well, I'm not quite sure I buy that they will look crappy (terrible CRI is an issue, but white balance does work) in low light, because they have larger apertures!

"It's the lens stupid"... is often true for bad images. More pixels (or even larger film) won't gain you that much, but more light will help with focus, contrast, saturation, noise etc.

Really, you could also say, "it's the lighting stupid"... but better lighting is a bit harder to set up than a larger lens. The cost can be moderate to make it really good. On the other hand making it just suck less, it usually pretty cheap. Thus the ring light you see suggested everywhere.

What amazes me is how good our eye is so that we don't notice terrible lighting.

All of those things may be true, but when I zoom using my webcam the picture is far worse than when I zoom using my pixel4. Same goes for audio.

I really, really wish I could get the calibre of A/V hardware in my high end phone as a separate device to plug into my computer. I did buy a nice microphone so I'm halfway there, but the webcam problem remains.

There are numerous Android/IOS apps which make your phone either a webcam or network camera.

Some examples are EpoCam, Camo, NDI Camera, etc.

Yes, this is good advice thank you.

The real problem I'm trying to solve is being able to use my phone while running a zoom, though!

Do you have a retired phone in a drawer somewhere?

I recently started taking Zoom calls in my office on my desktop, and didn’t have a webcam at all. I found EpocCam and used it on my iPhone X, but quickly pulled out my wife’s retired Galaxy S7 to use for this purpose.

At this point you can get a used S7 on eBay for ~$60. That’s cheaper than a webcam with similar image quality, and you can use the phone for other projects if that’s your thing.

I got out my pixel1 for exactly this reason. It began to boot, then hung, and now will not boot at all.

I might try to pick up a spare phone for cheap somewhere as you suggest.

If you're really going for the best, you need a lot.

But having a camera that takes in more light, everything else equal, can make a big difference all by itself.

I have worked as DOP in the past and couldn't agree more. What people need is a guide on how to manipulate the scene in front of the camera using what resources they have, plus a list of cheap or free things they can go get to help.

A better camera would be way down the list for me.

Top of the list would be a light panel and some rudimentary adjustable grip for it. Lighting changes, so over powering ambient light a bit with a strong diffuse light source is going to make the cameras life easier

I don't agree. The camera in my laptop is garbage. I have significantly better-quality Zoom calls if I use the front-facing camera on my phone. But that's cumbersome to use, so I generally put up with the bad quality from my laptop.

A better-quality camera for my laptop would turn my Zoom quality from "garbage" to "satisfactory". Yes, if I wanted to go from there to "movie quality" I'd have to invest in better lighting and other things, but that's not important enough to me to go to that bother. A better-quality camera (built into my laptop; I don't want to have yet another peripheral with yet another cable) would be something I'd happily pay for.

There are laptops with truly terrible cameras, in particular Dell, even in their most expensive laptops. These aren't my pictures, but I've tried different lighting but the pictures have the wrong colour, are low resolution and are extremely noisy: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9500-camera-webcam...

That doesn't ring quite true with me. I mean, I'm sure what you're saying is a big component of the problem, but... I can take a pretty nice video of my cat playing with a toy, just using my phone, without doing any work on lighting or anything. Ditto for taking a front-facing-camera video of myself and then playing it back.

However, even with some minimal effort on lighting (turning off lights behind me, keeping an overhead light and a light somewhat in front of me), my Zoom calls still look like shit (as do most of my co-workers', who are mostly using Macs).

Now, Google has put a lot of work into my phone's camera, work that I doubt Dell has put into the little built-in webcam on my laptop. But I doubt the camera in my phone is a significant part of the phone's BOM cost (though maybe I'm wrong about this). Would my laptop cost that much more if some more attention was paid to its integrated webcam?

And then Zoom is compressing the hell out of the video and is likely destroying quality in several places in the pipeline.

I agree that lighting is important, but I don't think it explains all that much of the issue we're talking about here. The camera hardware sucks, and the software pipeline is optimized for reliable delivery, not quality.

A webcam that "just works" seems like a herculean task if the goal is to have native compatibility with most devices without installing a package - Chromebooks, Apple, *nix, etc. but given how decent cameras are standard on mid-tier phones, you're spot on

Most webcam's I've tried do "just work" with *nix since they use USB UVC. And most linux distributions come with or can easily install the qt v4l2 package which can show you a live feed and let you adjust all the webcam's parameters that are exposed over UVC - for my current Logitech that's the common stuff like resolution, FPS, brightness/contrast/saturation, but also hardware-specific things like exposure (or autoexposure), pan/tilt/zoom, and focus / autofocus.

I'm pretty sure the situation is the same on ChromeOS and Macs. And I've seen that webcams these days also tend to be pretty plug-and-play on Windows.

Yea, in 2019 this article made sense. If there is ever a year to launch a high end webcam, it was 2020. A ton of professionals with disposable income and very few ways to spend it, sitting in Webex and Zoom calls all day. People are dropping tons of cash for ring lights and Lume Cubes.

These are already serving the Youtuber market, the same way that podcasters enjoy Blue Yetis. Which makes me wonder, what cameras are Youtubers using?

When I looked into it they’re mostly using mirrorless cameras like the Panasonic Lumix GH5 or the Sony a7siii with something like the elgato camlink 4k to get clean output.

The Sony A7SIII sensor is just as good as it gets outside of cinema rental market. But certainly any post 2010 APS-C or bigger Sony should do to reliably differentiate from consumer webcams, all you need is a bit more light. Maybe get a prime lens on top and that's it, if you're willing to deal with a HDMI capture setup. The specs of some 4k drone gimbals are also impressive, also using mostly Sony sensors, those might be the next best thing to motorized gimbal setups with optical zoom lens, like those used in telepresence sytems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511682

Yeah I think you're right.

I got the LG Meetup for my living room at the start of Covid and it's mostly an overpriced disappointment. I also had to get the external mic because the built in one doesn't have the range advertised (they actually advertise two different numbers).

I wanted something I could just plug into my TV PC to use for video chat. The Rally setup has the PTZ camera I wanted, but requires two external boxes which (as far as I can tell) serve no necessary purpose other than bad design.

In hindsight the PTZ rally camera with an unrelated third party mic would probably have been the best bet. I would have thought El Gato would come out with some high quality webcam eventually.

> Which makes me wonder, what cameras are Youtubers using?

iPads are taking over. You can get pretty amazing image quality with a new iPad Air or Pro. You can even get rigs with gimbals, lighting, and external mics for almost any budget.

How fast can the hardware market typically respond to a sudden and potentially short term increase in demand like this?

Depends. Inventing new products probably 1y out. But ramping up production on an existing product to a new category should have happened already.

Yeah I think they’d sell instantly.

I looked all over for one and it doesn’t exist. The mirrorless camera solution sucks because there’s not an obvious winner there either (and you usually need a capture card/camlink to convert the output from the camera).

The room scale ones like the LG meetup are overpriced and generally awful, the PTZ versions from them are even more expensive, use proprietary connectors for the mics and require a host of unnecessary external boxes.

The Facebook portal TV is a great product for most people, but I just want something like that I can plug into a PC.

There’s a vacuum in this market. The current options are either low quality, overpriced enterprise stuff or dealing with the hassle of a mirror less cam setup.

I personally wouldn't want to start in this market, because by the time anything could reasonably ship the COVID vaccine has been distributed enough and most people won't care that much anymore.

I don't think WFH and remote work are going away though, even if COVID does.

I think the demand for it will tamper down quite a bit although, and there are still many traditional places that aren't tech that are itching to get people back into offices.

>and you usually need a capture card/camlink to convert the output from the camera

Early on in the pandemic the major mirrorless camera providers (I believe at least Sony[1], Fujifilm[2], Canon[3], and Nikon[4]) all released software that lets you use any of their relatively recent cameras as webcams with the regular USB transfer/charging cable. A separate capture card is no longer a necessity.

[1] https://imagingedge.sony.net/en-us/ie-webcam.html

[2] https://fujifilm-x.com/global/products/software/x-webcam/

[3] https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se...

[4] https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products/548/Webca...

From what I had read at the time (may be better now) that software was bad and the low quality output from it negated most of the benefits of going with the mirrorless setup in the first place.

That's possible, but as others in the comments have mentioned it may be more people with bad lighting/positioning who just decided it was the camera/USB software that was faulty. Still, maybe it does suck. I never tried any of these programs myself because all of my cameras are just slightly too old to work with them.

The people I learned this from were professional YouTube people who have high quality lighting - it was the software.

As I understand these are all awful in their own way, typically with quality problems and extra latency as well as the extra complexity of the software.

The obvious solution is a camera mode in which it presents itself over USB as a webcam… As far as I know no "real" camera at any price does this.

I solve the problem with a Camlink, but it really should not be necessary.

I use a camlink 4k/nikon d610 and a Movo UM700. Great color and low-light performance, with natural bokeh, far superior to software background blur solutions.

Now, I'm not sure it's a great idea to actually present myself in such find detail ;). But it was fun to set up.

My Sony a6500 has been perfectly fine with my macbook since Sony released the new drivers. I haven't noticed any latency and love getting compliments from zoom peeps on the non-AI blur I get with my 16mm f1.4 lens.

What are the max supported resolution and framerate in this mode?

> The obvious solution is a camera mode in which it presents itself over USB as a webcam… As far as I know no "real" camera at any price does this.

There are! Fujifilm X-A7, Fujifilm X-T200, and Sigma fp are three mirrorless cameras that support UVC. And if you classify action cameras as "real" cameras too, the Insta360 ONE R also supports this.

Note that you may have to update the firmware and put the camera in webcam mode to get this to work.

The best solution I've found is using a app like ManyCam on both your phone and desktop to transmit the A/V stream to the computer and emulate a webcam. Has a ton of benefits like being able to adjust the picture, filters, switching webcams, being able to play videos for people, screen sharing.

Let's say you have a Mac. What hardware/software do you need other than the tripod to get a good mirrorless camera setup? I notice a lot of pro YouTubers use setups like this, but I'm not a photography guy so I don't know much about this.

You need something like the elgato camlink 4k and a camera that supports clean hdmi out.

That’s it - the software options today are bad.

The analysis is very good on the article until the conclusion, which ignores all the data.

It sets facts that there is no product in the market, there is A: "I do not care about anything, so I will buy a webcam" and B: "i care a little so i will spend $1000 instead of $300 on a phone with a integrated good camera" and C: "i will spend $10k on a DSLR and use as a webcam"

Then it measures the market size for A and ignores B and C, which are the actual market they will sell to!

A modern iSight would be great, especially if it could replace webcam and GoPro

The problems are:

- most work applications don’t benefit from the quality

- most people use smartphones and tablets as daily drivers

- photo/video enthusiasts already own cameras that can be put into service.

Sure, so who's going to start a webcam company and design a cheap good webcam in less than a year for a market that will be dead again in less than a year?

Might be dead again.

With (1) a virus that's going to keep mutating and require regular vaccine updates, (2) the current vaccines with two separated shots and unpleasant side effects, and (3) people ditching their masks even more now that vaccines are in the picture, I'm guessing there's enough uncertainty that people and companies with the money to buy down risk will still be interested for quite some time.

Though it'll still be competing with better lighting setups and recommendations for people to just videoconference from their cell phones. I wouldn't want to risk my capital on it, even though I'm pretty frustrated with my webcams' low quality.

I think the real problem that needs solving is eye-contact. That's the camera most people are going to buy, because the lack of eye contact is such an acute problem in video chats.

The rear-facing camera on a recent iPhone (or comparable high-end Android phone) is already going to exceed the quality ceiling for what streaming 2-way video will support in resolution and bitrate, given acceptable lighting and background.

If the front-facing camera on their laptop or tablet doesn't cut it, they should use the rear-facing camera on their phone, and put the rest of their effort into lighting and setup.

I started looking for a solution to "my webcam is a PoS" problem a few weeks ago. I realized that a good sensor etc. will cost money, so the hardware should be useful outside meetings. I thought I would spend about $500 on a basic DSLR. After some contemplation, I decided that this was an opportunity to take up a new hobby, and now I'm about to buy a Sony A6000 plus some prime lenses. Just an anecdote.

A camera off a $50 budget phone will probably beat every $100 webcam on the market. So why can't I get that same camera module, minus the phone parts but plus a usb interface, for $100.

Most likely because most of the difference is in the Qualcomm DSP attached to your phones SoC, not the actual camera module. The mobile phone images contain a lot of postprocessing which the webcams don't do.

Include the DSP then. You have twice the budget of the phone to produce the USB camera.

But you produce in lower quantities so your development cost makes up a larger slice of the pie, as well as other fixed costs deeper into your supply chain.

You can https://www.e-consystems.com/13mp-autofocus-usb-camera.asp

I bought one of these for using with my lab microscope since the alternatives from thorlabs was 10x more expensive for no reason. It worked fine for a year then it stopped working. Maybe I spillled something on it? Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thorlabs cameras, and scientific cameras in general, have very different response functions. useful if you want to make quantitative measurements, accurately represent a B&W scene, etc. I use a BlackFly (FLIR) camera on my scope, but have been looking to do something similar to you, since the camera API is not V4L2, but rather a custom framegrabber SDK.

I just wanted something to capture transmitted light images on a real-longterm setup. Turns out the best method is to wheel a simple tissue culture microscope to a warm room and put a cell phone on the eyepiece :) made some cool movies for sure!

Currently I'm playing with this: https://github.com/bionanoimaging/UC2-GIT which does a lot of that (mainly for educational purposes- I think most scientists should focus on getting grant money to buy professional equipment).

That's a candidate for sure, my efforts slightly predate the 3d printed microscope revolution slightly, and I had to MacGyver my way to prove I can image cell cultures long-term without spending 2-300k (since I was doing wild goose chase hypotheses) and hence this solution.

Are you playing with it in a garage or in an academic / industrial setting?

I'm not yet ready to start but my goal is to try and set up an actually productive garage lab - maybe use some neighbouring univ core facility on occasion but not to set up a lab there. Not a fan of academia in general and hope to not contribute money/ideology towards perpetuating that ponzi scheme!

Garage. The goal is to build a prototype which could then be scaled to a warehouse-sized robotic biological experimental system. But, I have also worked with such things in commercial settings.

I'd say that for most real scientists, it makes more sense to raise the funding to buy a professional scope because a lot of the dumbness is engineered out so scientists can just sit down and be productive.

Yeah I have one of these, the picture is nice with good lighting (I have a black and white one, with an antique 16mm film camera lens). Going to write a OBS plugin for it when I have time.

I'd be curious about this. I think what would make sense is to write a V4L2 driver for it, then any app that uses V4L2 could use it (on Linux). Or, is it far easier to write an OBS plugin than a driver?

Yeah thats another option. I haven't found one, but I do have userspace code that works.

Thorlabs don't make their own cameras by the way, they're white-label IDS Imaging products (at least they used to be).

Most of these [machine vision] cameras will communicate using genicam, so you can use libraries like Aravis and maybe there's a way of getting that to talk to V4L.

$250 is deep into mirrorless camera territory though.

Or GoPro, which you don't need a USB interface for. Works all the way back to hero 4 apparently.

https://gopro.com/en/us/news/how-to-use-gopro-for-webcam

A GoPro performs horribly in bad light though. And it costs serveral hundred dollars as well.

If you already own one, then it might be an option. But buying a GoPro to get a better webcam doesn't really make sense.

Neither of those things is true. You might have to mess with it a little bit in truly dark rooms, but if you can read comfortably you'll be just fine. And far better than any webcam.

If you by new $250 isn't close to getting you anything decent which also works for streaming as far as I know.

Plus for many cameras you need to capture their video output, i.e. USB is not enough (through that currently changes). So you need a capture chip with low latency or else things are bad for "life" usage. This is often another 60-130€ for something decent if brought anew.

Plus they don't have a monitor clip so you need buy an additional stand.

Sure you can buy used parts but then you also need to compare it with used part prices for webcams which normally (i.e. non Covid19) are also lower.

I mean a Sony a5100 with usable objective currently sells new for ~US$700 but you can probably get it new for that price with capture card and stand if you buy clever and we ignore Covid19 for fairness.

(And even used you are still far above 250€ for any recent decently usable mirror less camera with objective in my experience.)

AverMedia PW513 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5MfenW7EqA

Not a good buy

https://www.reddit.com/r/AverMedia/comments/jwuj70/just_got_...

It would be a hobbyist endeavor -- and look like one -- but a Raspberry Pi plus camera module would hit the mark.

Here: https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY

You can get an IP camera app and just use gstreamer to pipe it to v4l2loopback. Perfectly usable webcam available on /dev/video1.

Phones can already be used as a webcam, e.g droidcam app. No need for special hardware.

DroidCam connected via USB on my Android smartphone makes a great 1080p webcam. The latency is minimal.

It has great linux support and works great with OBS (and its chroma key filter)

Seconded, I wasn't satisfied leaving droidcam streaming over wifi 24x7, password or no password, so I have a shell alias to unlock phone and open droidcam over ADB USB debugging.

It depends on you phone.

I tried it with my phone and latencies made it unusable for video-conference usages. Given that this is my main usage reasonable low latenzies are for me much more important then super good image quality. So when I had to buy one recently I ended up with a ~70€ not super good but not bad webcam. I thing normally I might have bought something like a C920 but prices-return ratio was just madness when I bought (sight, Covid19 madness ;=) )

When John Gruber did his "zoom" video edition of his podcast the Talk Show (back around WWDC), the video wasn't actually zoom. They used zoom for live interaction, but everybody had an iPhone mounted above their laptop screens for the actual recorded video and audio which was composited in post-production.

I still can’t believe that Apple doesn’t make this super easy.

If they made this a feature they would be admitting that their laptop webcams aren't very good.

It's funny that Zoom disappears in the final product. The audio feed is recorded and re-synced on each source machine with a different software and sounds like the same with the video feed.

What's one such phone?

I've never seen a <$300 Moto phone match a $100 Logitech webcam.

Pixel 2 is quite cheap and will be far superior.

Can't say I did a ton of research to find such a phone but based on my experience in the past it certainly doable.

https://www.amazon.com/BLU-Studio-GSM-Unlocked-Smartphone/dp...

There is one for $70 on amazon that might be a contender. I'm sure if I searched aliexpress or something I could find something better for even cheaper.

Webcams have been a race to the bottom product for many years now, just like optical drives. All of the quality manufacturers were driven out the market ages ago and all that's left now is the absolute cheapest garbage sold to people who just need to check a box.

You would think there would be a secondary market for all of the fancy phone cameras now being made, but sticking one in a box with a USB connector hanging out the bottom (or Bluetooth) seems like too much of an ask when you can just put an absolute garbage 720p sensor in the same box and save a few bucks.

> We’re not streaming high-bitrate 1080p H.265 on our 5-person Zoom calls. After compression and denoising the extra sharpness and low noise of a high end camera doesn’t add much benefit.

This was my experience exactly after testing different setups. I still use my Lumix GX8 for photography and home videos, but it wasn't even close to worth the trouble of maintaining the setup compared to a ~$100 Logitech option that I leave on top the monitor with good lighting and plug in via usb hub as needed.

This is plainly wrong. I use Sony a5100 (cheapest camera you can hook up as webcam) and in zoom meetings the difference between my image and others (even though some tried to use their phones) is just night and day.

Disclaimer: I am that brother referred in the article. :)

I have to imagine that everyone who says this only tried a cheap lens with a teeny aperture. The narrow depth of field of a good camera+lens combo looks vastly different from a consumer webcam, and survives compression (easily, in fact, since the low frequency data in the background gets quantized less brutally than the high-frequency data of your face). In fact, I think that’s the primary visual cue for the “pro” look. Your GX8 is MFT, so you'd need a pretty wide lens (at least f/2, ideally f/1.4) to appreciate this.

Right on the money.

I’m not sure I get people’s use cases here. Ok, if you’re creating/streaming video, I get that you need a good webcam.

But for your teams’ standups, refinements etc...is video quality really an issue?

Usually I’m in a call with 5-10 others. One will be sharing a screen or we will be collaborating on a whiteboard. Other people’s webcam feeds are stamp-sized somewhere in the periphery of my vision. Most people want to hide their surroundings and will use a lame backdrop or a blur filter.

So we’re talking about spending hundreds of dollars to make your 100x100 pixel face that no one is looking at anyway a bit sharper?

Erm, I bought an Avaya HC020 (about $250) back at the beginning of the pandemic. It's quite nice--my images are always better than everyone short of pro streamers. You can flip the image, color balance, etc. all in the webcam with a remote control (this is why I got it--"flip the image" was causing my laptop fans to screech at max RPM for a different webcam)

I've never used it, but if you really need microphone arrays, then probably the Avaya CU360 is probably for you. Bonus: it's standalone Android so you can install all the streaming apps on the device instead of on your computer.

And, why not microphone arrays? Because echo cancelling is a nightmare technology that requires real R&D. Somebody always gets the setup wrong on conference calls. The new macs haven't been out long enough for me to trust that Apple actually solved the problem any better.

It matters less for internal meetings (maybe improving audio quality could help meetings run more smoothly, but that's just a microphone issue).

If any of your employees talk to external clients, I can absolutely see value in getting them set up with a better webcam and internet connection, and I don't think you'd want every sales rep and partner engineer spending a day futzing around with an enthusiast-grade setup.

I think you're underestimating personal vanity. Plastic surgery and teeth whitening has SPIKED since the pandemic started because people are looking at their own faces on zoom all day in tiny boxes next to their coworkers. People will drop endless cash to make themselves look better on camera.

I frequent the reddit beauty forums and hobbyist non-engineers who have zoom meetings for work are dropping $$ on Diva Lights and video filtering apps etc.

Just today driving to the carwash I passed three strip mall aesthetic places advertising fillers and botox.

I posted a tutorial on how to set up a green screen and diva light and within a week I had three coworkers order them- I joked with DVE Store that I should start getting a commission.

Pro tip: If you want a good webcam, don't search for a webcam, search for USB machine vision cameras and find a good lens to go with it. The Sony Exmor or Starvis series of sensors are great.

Or use a Pi HQ camera which is an IMX477 (an excellent sensor at its price point) and turn it into a USB webcam with a Pi Zero:

https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam#readme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcbP7lEdzY

Finally someone suggesting machine vision cameras! These are awesome devices for many applications and they have become way more accessible in the past few years, both in terms of price and by moving to USB3 instead of GigE interface.

They are still targetting industrial and medical applications in their marketing but it's such an untapped potential. Many manufacturers, huge choice of models.

You can turn your old phone into a webcam. An iPhone X has camera quality that competes with a cheap DSLR in a webcam situation.

Main thing real cameras are better at is bokeh, but you won’t get that in a webcam. And software can passably fake it these days.

How?

On iOS there's an app called Camo. There are probably others.

Camo (https://reincubate.com/camo/) has been absolutely fantastic. I wanted to use my iPhone Xs when on calls and not have to fiddle with with plugging it in every time I needed a video, so I ended up using an old iPhone 6 and it still destroys every webcam. $40/year isn't the cheapest but it works so much better than EpocCam (which I had been using before).

I’d second this. Camo is fantastic and with an armature mounted above my monitor I can get a much more flattering angle with a great picture even on an old 6+ front facing camera.

Camo is fantastic.

“Droid”Cam does a good job of turning my iPhone Xs into a USB webcam for Ubuntu.

iphone + lightning-digital-av-adapter + airmix solo[1] + camlink-4k = webcam

[1]: app that gives nice clean hdmi output, and has decent color/brightness controls

This doesn't make any sense. Mirrorless cameras cost a couple thousand dollars (I have one) and the last thing I am going to wear down/abuse this equipment with, is to jump into daily meeting lol. At the low end, there are decent webcams, like Logitech HD 1080p, but it costs over 100$ and honestly, it's a couple of years behind the current. There don't seem to be webcams of around 100 to 200$ that are state of the art. If you look at mobile phones, you see the difference. Those mobile cameras are like 1/5 or 1/10th of the size a webcam could be, so there is LOTs of room for improvement, even in this price segment.

I am pretty sure we could easily get 4k recording with decent, artificial depth-of-field (LIDAR & all) under decent lighting conditions (which is why this can be done cheap) at a price point of 100 to 200$. Just nobody seems to be doing it.

And yeah we definitely do stream 1080p over meetings and most people are always like "Oh wow, what kind of webcam are you using". That's for my years old logitech... The bitrates are pretty low, even for 4k. You can definitely have a couple of those over almost any current internet connection without issues.

My main gripe is depth-of-field. Add some LIDAR and I am happy. Apple webcam anyone?

Logitech Brio is probably the most "state of the art" webcam you can find (and it's a few years old). Decent quality 4k (or 1080 at buttery FPS) with all manner of gubbins to correct lighting - amount, flicker, hue etc Oh, and does have depth sensing - with separate lens that'll scan your face and log you into windows (or out when you walk off).

> with separate lens that'll scan your face and log you into windows

And hence the problem. Now you have a camera is dependent on custom drivers deeply entwined with your OS that are a security risk. It also isn't likely to have usable drivers five years down the line.

It works like normal webcam if you don't need face recognition login.

there are £400~£600 mirrorless cameras that would be overkill for most people... to notice any difference you'd need pro-level lighting, and a fantastic internet connection - and then you can justify the high-end 4-digit $$$ camera

I can see the argument that the market for mid-range webcams must be pretty small, as the ~$100 range is ok for most people

I could buy a refurb or used Olympus E-M5 mark ii on ebay for $250, then pick up a lens and be in business.

I actually did run my Fuji camera as a webcam for a Q&A at work. 35mm f/1.4 with a ring light left me looking downright pretty if I do say so myself.

https://imgur.com/7CxnRLK

That's quite a difference, indeed.

The real limitation: Fuji’s software for Mac is not amazing. It works, but it’s not entirely reliable.

I use my Fuji x-t3 with a viltrox 23mm f1.4 regularly as a webcam at work. During the first week in all the meetings there was always someone asking about how did I get that 'cinematic' look.

Mirrorless cameras cost a couple thousand dollars

No, they don't: https://www.adorama.com/ifjxt200sk.html

And that's a new, relatively expensive model.

"On Backorder Order now, your card will not be charged until it is ready to ship."

Generally, this means "a long time". I've been waiting 6 months for a recommended underwater camera, still nada.

What meeting software are you using that streams 1080p?

> You can’t buy a good webcam because the number of people willing to pay a lot of money for a high end webcam is very small.

And the subset that is not easily fooled by proclaimed premium versions of the same cheap junk is even smaller.

I don't know, a $400 Apple Cam™ might do the trick.

iCam. :)

And then there's folks at the mid end, who buy an $80 Razer Kiyo purely for the decent video with built-in ring light so you're never backlit, with a separate $99 microphone and $150 audio interface. Buying all the bits separately gets you what this author wants, just not in a single tidy package.

The price for audio stuff seems truly out-of-this-world compared to everything else.

I get microphones have a lot of design/testing that might justify it. But all the interfacing gear seems ridiculous.

If you have niche requirements then expect to pay some premium for the gear because the development costs are amortized into the unit price. It’s that way for AV gear as well as many other niches.

If the market won’t bear the price then people or companies able or willing to bear the development risk will shrink, or in this case maybe never develop.

Wait till you realize that they actually want to pay more for it because the idea it cost so much makes it sound better to you.

I'm not sure I follow, you consider $100 for a microphone that sounds like you're standing next to the person instead of listening to them over the internet expensive?

As for audio interfaces: if you don't want one, don't buy one, get the same mix as USB version instead of XLR, and done.

I have this exact setup except I just bought the Samson Q2U microphone ($100ish with stand) which has USB output (in addition to XLR). I doubt I'd be able to tell the difference.

Also, as someone that recently upgraded their wifi router and runs a ping script to make sure my connection is always good, upgraded my mic for better sound quality, etc only to have zoom video calls with people on an iPhone with shit reception, fixing your end only does so much.

If you're a game streamer or other type of streamer and are willing to fork over the cash, it's probably easier to buy an $800~$1k Sony Handycam and USB-C capture device. The majority of game streamers don't really need that though, although they might fork it over because they already have HDMI capture cards with dual inputs.

But for the most part, most streamers don't care about their little picture in the bottom 1/4 to 1/8 of the screen. Good lighting in the filming room is much more important than the camera anyway.

In the middle it is everyone who has a phone that can take decent video.

I think there is a market for consumers who want a better webcam though. Especially in a post-covid world with more remote workers. I know several people who are unhappy with their laptop webcams for web conferences, but discover that external webcams aren't much better. And these people don't want an expensive mirrorless camera, they just want a webcam with comparable quality to a smartphone camera.

tbh I'm surprised that GoPro hasn't been exploding into this category. Granted, their cameras do a heck of a lot more than just webcams (... which is good for longer-term use), but they're small, cheaper than a mirrorless, wider angle than a normal mirrorless camera lens, and already have a stable market and existing users.

> A high end webcam would have to be cheap enough that the first group doesn’t mind spending a bit more, but not so expensive that the enthusiast target audience just decides to buy a full-featured mirror less camera instead.

This makes it sound like the two requirements are in contradiction but in both you're asking for the price to be lower.

> the number of people willing to pay a lot of money for a high end webcam is very small.

More kids today want to be “youtubers” than astronauts and almost all YouTube work is done off tower PCs.

Might not be enough a market for all brands to make one but definitely think someone’s missing a trick of being the Go Pro of streaming.

To make your list even more dire, it seems hard to compete with something like the Logitech BRIO at $200.

Just upgraded my webcam to a very cheap action cam (60 euros). Huge upgrade compared to the laptop camera, but still pretty bad with low lighting. Using a good action cam like the insta360 might be a good fit for someone looking for a better webcam.

I realized the same situation exists with Mail Boxes. At homedepot/amazon you can get a $20 mailbox or a $40 mailbox which are both shitty. Or you can get a 300-900 mailbox which is very high quality.

I finally found a decent one on wayfair for 60.

Wait can you really use a Canon R5 as a webcam? Could be a business expense.

> We’re not streaming high-bitrate 1080p H.265 on our 5-person Zoom calls.

Right, even on my higher end webcam, on a connection with 200mbps up, Zoom shows my video (set to HD), as 720p15.

And I'd add that there is a middle ground of higher end webcams that people can buy. Which in my experience as someone who would do the camera thing if I had no other option, works fine even for recorded video.

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