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Comment by profquail | Hacker News Reader

The Opal webcam ($300) looks fairly similar in specification to the new(ish) Dell UltraSharp webcam ($200): https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-webcam/apd/3...

What is Opal offering over the Dell webcam for the extra $100?

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The knowledge that it won't work on a Windows machine, as far as I can tell from their ad copy.

Edit: Though, to be fair, apparently the Dell one doesn't support macOS?

What's the difference?

This Opal has a good quality lens. f/1.8 is a large aperture. That means it can gather a lot of light. Six glass elements probably means it has good geometric and color distortion characteristics. The specs say it has a fixed focus from 10cm to infinity. That's not bad.

Lenses like that for DSLRs retail for $100 or more.

The Dell webcam specs say nothing, but nothing, about the lens. That usually means it's a coke-bottle shard. (meaning cheap and barely acceptable.)

Opal are also bragging about a beam-forming mic array (that is, a software shotgun mic). That's worth money. No mic at all on the Dell.

Compare various smartphones. Many smartphone makers brag about their lenses.

F/1.8 is a familiar number to people only because of how that number matters for a full frame, APS-C, or 4/3 sensor. It doesn't translate well to what would produce good image quality on an 8mm sensor. The equivalent F number will be much higher. Using it in this context is just marketing. I'm not saying it's bad, just that the information they're giving isn't what people will understand it as, which I think is a bit misleading.

My friend wrote a very interesting article on the topic if you're curious - I had no idea about most of this:

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2666934640/what-is-equival...

There's really nothing special about an f/1.8 lens for a tiny sensor. Every smartphone has this. Many CCTV cameras have something like a 3-8 mm f/1.0 zoom on them (they're cheap).

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