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.
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.