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Comment by britneybitch | Hacker News Reader

> At that price-point, are there other devices on the market that already fulfill the need?

No there aren't. Webcams in 2022 all have miniscule lenses/sensors paired with decade-old tech and none of the big players seem interested in producing anything higher quality.

https://reincubate.com/support/how-to/why-are-webcams-bad/

If you want high-quality video capture, your options are pretty much just (1) plug in a "real" $$$$ DSLR/mirrorless camera which will be fiddly and prone to overheating, or (2) use a cell phone as an IP camera, which will add noticeable latency and is still a tiny sensor compensated for by AI.

If this was for sale fully assembled I'd easily spend a few hundred on it. I don't care about networking, just give me plain old USB.

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>> At that price-point, are there other devices on the market that already fulfill the need?

> No there aren't.

There are tons of cameras that meet this need. They're "machine vision" or "scientific" cameras, google for those. Edmund Scientific has a good selection. They're ridiculously expensive for what you get if you're comparing against a webcam or a surveillance camera since they're very similar to those for >10x the price. That's the price of low volume assembly, proper support, et cetera.

Astronomical cameras and microscope cameras are affordable. Some of them mm support sensors that uses them even supports Sony's proprietary protocol.

A lot of sbc boards support MIPI CSI (iirc even RPI). Nvidia robotic modules has IO for Sony's LVDS (driver not provided though).

That's also the price of selling to a market that can afford to spend gazillions on crap cameras.

There is another option: You can buy relatively high quality PTZ cameras designed for low-end broadcast (HoW and legislative mostly). Some will output to USB, at the higher end you’ll need to capture SDI, NDI, or 2110.

I have a coworker with this setup and it’s easily the best video quality I’ve ever seen on a teams call even in his fairly dark room.

I’d ask you to find and share the model number they used, but I feel like it would be OOS by the time I remembered to look, then come back at 3-6X the price.

https://www.photo4less.com/product/bzgear-ptz-full-hd-1080p-...

The “professional video” category has quite a few

The insta360 sells at about €300-350 including VAT. This is $1000 EX.

Is the video quality that much better? Or is there some other feature that justifies the price?

A lot of PTZ cameras have fairly large sensors compared to webcams or phones, and unlike a phone or DSLR they’re designed to be operated continuously so they shouldn’t overheat.

> is there some other feature that justifies the price?

Physical lens zoom on most of those, with decent lens sizes, but that's not that helpful for a Zoom call, unless you've got a very weird setup.

PTZ = pan tilt zoom

SDI is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface

NDI and 2110 are video-over-IP standards. https://renewedvision.com/blog/guide-to-video-standards-sdi-...

HoW I can't figure out.

House of Worship maybe

> low-end broadcast (HoW and legislative mostly)

I like how the original comment was kind of slagging HoW and legislative to the lower realms of quality. For the most part, that's going to be true, but there's definitely edge cases. I run in weird circles having grown up in HoW production and moving into cinematic production. One of the megachurches in town is one of Sony's flagship install locations. They always have the top end equipment that even some production houses can't get yet. The amount of money that flows through these places is flabbergasting. Their control rooms are better equipped than some of the live sports trucks I've been in. The only thing they are missing is the crew of slo-mo operators. They have a couple of seats for shaders, they have chyron ops, they have technical director, director, multiple sound boards (one for record, one for stage, one for broadcast), and just an incredible amount of gear overall. Yes, this is said from a state of jelly.

Wasn’t try to slag HoW at all[*]! Just a lot of cheap broadcast PTZs are built with more price sensitive customers in mind, who often come from legislative, corporate or house of worship. You can absolutely find high-end sophisticated productions in all those fields, but the field also has much more of a low-end (both in terms of cost and in terms of production complexity) than you’ll normally find in most more traditional broadcast verticals.

* I actual have a love for HoW as a vertical because they’re much more willing to try wild or experimental things with their production since they often have a greater tolerance for things going wrong and often have entire days of downtime between shows to tinker. This is probably part of why they’re a Sony flagship - willingness to run beta software! I know of at least one other vendor who has churches as beta testing sites…

There are a number of churches like this in the USA, yes.

But before anybody freaks out too much, it's probably worth pointing out that the median church size is 75 people.

I'm curious what the median church "experience" is of those that attend. One could imagine a single 50 million member church and two churches of 75, which would lead to a median church size of 75 but a median experience of 50 million fellow congregants.

The mean size is quite a bit larger, meaning that many people are in much larger churches, like the one discussed above.

I think in this context it's "house of worship."

A much much more expensive option?

PTZ is really nice but for normal webcam use doesn't add much.

> or (2) use a cell phone as an IP camera which will add noticeable latency

You can use them directly via USB using Camo or OBS - no IP needed, and that changes the latency equation.

Also, the new iOS continuity webcam feature is essentially zero latency - it's better than my good webcams.

You can buy an IMX477 board with CSI output and a CSI->USB board, ~$100 combined.

Not quite a fully assembled solution but all you have to do is screw the two boards together with a few standoffs.

I haven't had a lot of success in this regard. Do you have any links I could review to do this?

For example (I just emailed Arducam about this):

The IMX477/R sensor supports Full (16:9) Binning 1080P @ 2028(H) × 1128(V) with 240hz/fps availability in a drive mode. However, no IMX477/R package I've ever found - including those from Arducam - support a CSI->USB board or similar that can drive this mode, only allowing 100 FPS maximum on most packages. (ex: https://www.uctronics.com/arducam-high-quality-complete-usb-...)

I am looking to buy a product involving the IMX477/R sensor that can drive this mode or similar 240 FPS modes, but cannot find it for the life of me despite the datasheet openly supporting this drive mode.

Forget the USB boards, they all work to the best of the USB / UVC limitations but they aren’t great. You want to hook your camera sensor up to a processor with a CSI input.

Image sensors are really just high speed ADC clocking out data, whether the data is useful or not is up to the viewer. What I’m getting at is forget FPS and think data rates.

So, you need a processor that is that can handle that data rate. The napkin math says 2K@240FPS has the same data rate as 4K@60FPS. All you need is a processor or module that can handle it and you’re golden. There are demos of the RPI pushing 1000fps (at a significant lower resolution) but you get the point.

Off the top of my head, NVIDIA jetson, imx8m mini plus, the latest allwinner V series, and a whole host of unobtainable in less than 10k qty parts all supported this. The rest is up to you.

Also, RPi is out even with 4 lanes because the CSI input doesn’t support the speed required on each lane.

You seem knowledgeable in this area. Do you know how image sensor support works? Can you attach any camera with CSI to the SBCs that you listed?

Short answer - No. The MIPI CSI-2 (CSI has been deprecated) interface is not plug and play. It requires some tuning of the handshaking between the image sensor and the receiving SOC. I think the RPI + HQ camera + libcamera is the best place to start to learn a full camera system since libcamera is open source. The software stack for a camera is a pretty large undertaking. The ISP calibration and AAA algorithms are generally closely held by various camera companies.

I've written raw frames to memory using the RPi HQ cam and RPi4 and processed them in ffmpeg/dcraw for example, so I'm familiar with that methodology. I can take it from there if I can find an IMX477 sensor (or similar) plus 4+ MIPI lanes to get full drive mode.

Any idea where to start? I am proficient enough in scripting/coding to pick up a new platform like the Jetson/Nvidia products, but no idea where to find the correct sensor+board package to actually give me the data rates I need.

Looking for 240fps/hz @ 720p in some form of greyscale, for the record.

Consumer webcams aren't the only class of device that you can plug into computers to capture images/videos.

Yeah, no, you don't need a DSLR. A point and shoot with a good sensor is more than enough. My Sony RX100 runs all day without issue and acts as a fantastic webcam via a cheap HDMI to USB adapter. Total cost used < $500.

I use an entry level mirror less DSLR, the canon M50. And I think it was about $350 and it can connect directly via USB.

You could probably pick up those big old Cisco video conferencing cameras, which take 12V power, emit up to 1080p video over HDMI (which goes into whatever generic HDMI capture card you have) and are controlled over RS232 using Sony VISCA commands.

The cameras themselves aren't especially "hackable" but then they don't need to be, because everything going in and out is extremely well-documented.

If your need is video conferencing, relatively recent ‘insta360 link’ is _very_ good. I’ve ditched my mirrorless+HDMI setup in favor of it and haven’t seen any drop in quality.

Companion app is pretty shit though, but they seem to be working on it.

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