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 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.
All this is true, yet the difference between a bad laptop webcam and a high-end phone front camera is huge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Keeping in mind this is for a feature that most people actually don't care about.
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.
I Skype with family a couple of times a week. I'd gladly pay another $100-200 for a better integrated webcam.
Now with everyone working remotely I could see a quality demand happening but no where near the interest in phone cams.
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).
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.
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...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_puller#:~:text=A%20foc....
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.
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.
Some examples are EpoCam, Camo, NDI Camera, etc.
The real problem I'm trying to solve is being able to use my phone while running a zoom, though!
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 might try to pick up a spare phone for cheap somewhere as you suggest.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
But having a camera that takes in more light, everything else equal, can make a big difference all by itself.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
That’s it - the software options today are bad.
These are already serving the Youtuber market, the same way that podcasters enjoy Blue Yetis. Which makes me wonder, what cameras are Youtubers using?
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.
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.
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!
It's rather mind-blowing that back then its 640×480-pixel VGA resolution was considered good.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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)_/¯
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
It has great linux support and works great with OBS (and its chroma key filter)
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 ;=) )
I've never seen a <$300 Moto phone match a $100 Logitech webcam.
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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I am that brother referred in the article. :)
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?
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'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.
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.
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:
They are still targetting industrial and medical applications in their marketing but it's such an untapped potential. Many manufacturers, huge choice of models.
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.
[1]: app that gives nice clean hdmi output, and has decent color/brightness controls
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?
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.
No, they don't: https://www.adorama.com/ifjxt200sk.html
And that's a new, relatively expensive model.
Generally, this means "a long time". I've been waiting 6 months for a recommended underwater camera, still nada.
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
And the subset that is not easily fooled by proclaimed premium versions of the same cheap junk is even smaller.
I get microphones have a lot of design/testing that might justify it. But all the interfacing gear seems ridiculous.
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.
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.
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.
This makes it sound like the two requirements are in contradiction but in both you're asking for the price to be lower.
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.
I finally found a decent one on wayfair for 60.
Right, even on my higher end webcam, on a connection with 200mbps up, Zoom shows my video (set to HD), as 720p15.
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.