Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway.
Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.
That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.
(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)
> It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.
OBS with virtual camera. Add the camera as a source, scale and crop to your heart's content, click 'start virtual camera', then launch your videoconferencing software and choose the virtual camera.
Thanks! I already glanced at my options and this one seemed like overkill, but yeah it does sound like the go-to solution that everyone uses. Will be installing this some time soon, thanks for confirming this is the way to go :) (Also to the sibling comment)
On linux you may be able to set it up with fmpeg and v4l2loopback (create a v4l2loopback device and have ffmpeg grab your input, crop it, and output to that device).
Maybe less overkill, but probably more involved to set up though so OBS is probably your best choice unless it is really too heavy.
You could use OBS studio to crop the image. It takes your webcam as an input and creates a virtual cam that works with every conferencing software I've tried. (It can also use your phone camera with the aid of the DroidCam OBS app.)
> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing
As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.
You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not sure, but if you're having trouble understanding, getting 80% as text plus your own hearing and lip reading might be a big aid.
Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.
I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.
That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people in our team are not native English speakers and it does a really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the meeting is pure comedy.
There honestly didn't seem to be any such rhyme or reason to it - it was way too frequent. Often replacing a whole sentence. (Not that those either side would be recognisable enough to see that it was a sentence between them being replaced.)
The first time we saw it there was a good lot of 'what the hell is this' before we even realised it was supposed to be a transcript, it was that bad. I'm not talking about just the odd bits replaced with weird words/phrases - the whole thing would be utter nonsense.
(And this was in Cambridge, not to say everybody was local (I'm not), but still, predominantly 'standard' not-straying-too-far-from-RP accents, it's not like it was some difficult niche regional accent & dialect that it couldn't understand.)
We use it as a joke internally. It requires plain English, spoken slowly with a generic US accent (even fake) - anything else is proper bad. To be fair it has improved nontrivially, though.
As others have mentioned, Microsoft Teams also has an auto-generated Live Captions feature. It supports creating live captions for a number of spoken languages [0].
Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription [1].
While such features can be helpful, using them is rather different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a conversation.
+1 to that. I don't want to be in ultra HD in meetings. I mean, I also don't want to look like a character from a 90s CD-ROM game -- but that's a matter of bandwidth, not the camera.
In a way, 720p or below is a non-vain version of applying a filter, smoothing imperfections away.
Don't think this is actually true. We stream high definition video regularly nowadays. It's not a question of resolution, but of other qualities of the recording, the way differences in lighting is handled etc. Those imperfections are not smoothed away by compression.
To your point, I've seen some modern webcams accentuate extremely minor facial blemishes to the point where observers actually notice it and call it out, concerned that the person is sick or has had some sort shaving incident. I would think compression would make that even worse.
Mine does this. It makes me look drunk. People who met me in real life after lockdown were surprised I looked normal. I keep meaning to find some software that will turn the red down.
I don’t know how much time you spend on zoom calls but if both sides have genuinely good connections and you have a good camera and lighting, you can get fairly high def video across. And it makes a big difference, especially if you’re 1-1 and want to make a proper connection and read their expression.
Big meetings are the most worthless meetings anyway. It's 1:1s or three person meetings I find most productive, and where I care more about video quality.
If you tweak some zoom settings you can get a slightly-less-shitty bitrate, and people constantly comment on the quality of my MILC-based setup (APS-C camera with a cheapo chinese prime f/1.2 lens). This is vs the $200-ish logitech external webcam that is standard issue at my company.
Yeah I kind of agree. We're years away from when most people's videoconferencing quality is close to C920 quality. Audio is much more important. The C920's is pretty crap. You can easily buy better mics, but unfortunately most people just don't care about the quality of their own output.
I think part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to know your audio/video sounds/looks crap to other people. For most users they won't have a clue until someone says "I can't hear you" lots of times.
Zoom doesn't even have a way to test your connection.
Zoom is the test of connection itself. The way it handles choppy link with slowdown then speedup technique to mask the issues, balances audio over video priority etc, just amazes me. One of the best videoconf software I used since 1990s which works in really shitty conditions (remote LTE, HSDPA).
Well, Zoom dynamically adopts to whatever connection pipe you have, you get "Your internet connection is unstable" when the net is really really bad - several seconds pings and packet loses etc. If you see it too often then the test is failed :)
At the end of the day, you'll mostly end up as a glorified thumbnail in a small corner of a, let's be realistic, 1080p screen, next to a bunch of other people. No one in the call gains anything by watching each other, it doesn't matter. For this case, just get a good microphone (even a 30€ Behringer sounds much better than whatever it is most people use).
But compression looks so much better when it has decent source material to work with. It's the crappy noisy stuff it screws up on because it views the noise as detail and tries to preserve it, at the expense of details you do actually care about.
This is why movies still look really good even at surprisingly low bitrates (well one of the reasons, the other is of course unlimited time and lots of budget for tuning the compression which realtime applications don't have)
Agreed. I set up a really nice webcam by using a Mirrorless Full Frame camera and my wife refuses to use it when she sits at my desk. She doesn't want her coworkers to see her with that much detail and clarity.
By the way, just using a Sony or Panasonic mirrorless is fine, you don't need to buy a custom high-end webcam, and you can use those for taking pictures and videos when you're out on the weekend.
Another +1. I got a HP w100 480P 30 FPS for this purpose. It serves my purpose best which is interviews and screen shares with friends. I can be seen and recognized and save on bandwich.
I had a Logitech C920 that died a couple years ago and when I went to find a better replacement I ended up buying a... Logitech C920. I couldn't find anything that seemed significantly better that wasn't a lot more money. I regret the purchase, but I'm glad I didn't just spend 3 times as much on a still-not-that-great webcam. I was thinking of finding a second-hand digital camera on eBay, but maybe instead I'll see if a friend has an old iPhone.
Though you'd think with the WFH revolution there would be at least one company out there making a high-quality purpose-built webcam.
I guess I don't understand the mechanism where by you use an android phone as an external webcam. Guess I never tried just plugging it in via usb and seeing if my OS picked it up...
There are quite a few apps that let you easily do that. I use DroidCam which let's you do it over your local network as well, reducing the cables running to your PC.
Logitech dominates the market, and it dominates it by marketing spend, not on making a better product, since they know that the average consumer will never know the difference.
I bought a C920 on the basis of many shilled reviews, and I kneel to the power of their marketing department every time I turn that piece of junk on.
I use the bad Mac onboard for almost all work conferencing because it's right there and doesn't require me to occupy a port on the laptop for in the end just different bad video quality.
Yeah it’s wild how much of a vacuum exists in this market and how bad it is.
I have the same webcam I also bought the lg meetup for a larger room and it sucks - it especially sucks considering the price.
The Opal is a weak attempt to improve this, but includes a mic I don’t want (lots of decent separate mics exist). The mirrorless setup looks great, but with latency, capture cards, over heating, external battery packs, required camera arms etc. just a huge pain.
I wish apple would just make a good one again since nobody else seems capable of it.
I recently got the Obsbot tiny 4k webcam. Even though 4k won't come through on videoconferencing software the color seems much more natural than Logitech webcams.
The webcam market is a niche market. Even game streamers, arguably the most "consumer" like target audience that cares about quality, will often put the image of their face in a corner of their screen.
The simple fact of the matter that the target for webcam seems to be to be either good enough or to be better than the competition. Neither of those are very high bars.
There are some improvements in webcam land. There's a trend towards more higher-quality consumer webcams even if they're ridiculously expensive for what they deliver.
One problem I have noticed with using phones as webcams is that often the image will look distorted if you're not right in the center of the camera. The closer you go towards the edges, the more your face will get distorted in width or in height. This is a natural consequence of how these tiny lenses are able to get such a wide picture so I can't really fault phone manufacturers for this, but it's something to keep in mind when you pick the more obvious solution and just stick your phone to your monitor.
I am hoping that Apple's Continuity Camera "just works" as the camera and lighting are excellent. I was on the hunt for a decent webcam last year and surprised this didn't "just work" already without flakey 3rd party apps, etc.
I still have my iSight camera plugged to my Mac. 'Tis a shame it won't work when I will upgrade to an M-series Mac even though I don't even use the camera for anything.
It definitely does have some overheating issues, but it looks too good. I might use the shell and replace the guts with a Raspberry Pi powered camera [0] if I can actually get my hands on a Pi Zero with the shortage we have right now
> If I could I'd still be using my 480p external 2003 iSight camera through an increasingly ridiculous series of dongles
Why? 480p does not sound better than today's mediocre webcams, does it have some amazing light balance or face detection for focus or something?
I would want to do this as well for shits and giggles, a 2003 webcam with 4 dongles being nearly on par with modern webcams is fun / hackery / a conversation starter, but I'm curious if it's more than just that. (My own ~2005 webcam simply connects with USB and works out of the box on any modern hardware running Linux. I suppose I didn't and don't think different enough.)
Great features too in the magnetic monitor attachment and the fancy aperture to close and turn off the camera.
The low resolution is somewhat appealing, in a retro way. If I'm going to be using a crappy external webcam it's cool that the image looks like an early 2000s PowerBook.
The FireWire iSight camera's image looks like ass but it's good enough for my potato face.
The camera's bundled FireWire 400 cable connects to a hard drive enclosure that also has a FireWire 800 port (the camera's cable is detachable so this could be replaced with a FireWire 400 to 800 cable). The FireWire 800 cable runs to a Thunderbolt 2 dock with a FireWire port and the dock's Thunderbolt 2 cable runs to a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter connected to an Intel MacBook Pro.
I like built-in, irised camera cover though by twisting it open/closed, I often shift the position slightly. The camera's stand sits on a box wedged between the wall and my monitor; I wish I had a slightly smaller box so the camera was a little lower, closer to the top of the monitor.
I had all these parts so it was a zero dollar way to get a camera above my external monitor. I might try the free version of EpocCam with an old iPhone (too old to work with Apple's forthcoming Continuity Camera feature) but that's bound to be more fussy to start/stop.
You can use you phone's camera as a webcam with Reincubate's Camo App. This required a wired connection iirc.
You can also use OBS Studio along with a virtual camera plugin to use any device which can output directly to your computer.
But most of these solutions do not work on Safari or FaceTime unless you manually modify the app.
Now, Apple is going to soon introduce their "It Just Works" solution with the next release of macOS and iOS. You will be able to use your iPhone's camera as a webcam wirelessly with your Mac by just sticking your phone on the back (Apple is partnering with Belkin[0] for this stand) [1]
I personally don't care about the camera as much as I care about the sound quality.
I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.
Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding, camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop. Phones are "always" (although that might not be true forever!) going to have more space for bigger and better lenses.
A camera bump could easily be added and with a redesign of the palm rest/touch pad area there could be a recess or slight curve down to fit, you're absolutely right
Laptop "lids" are a lot thinner than your average phone, they might be able to use a plateau like at the back of the phones to house it but I'd guess if there would be a simple solution that they could "just" do it would've happened already.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day to the next. Don't you think they would've done that instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution for the new Continuity camera?
Designing a laptop by sacrificing portability for camera quality is absolutely not rational design. No one is walking around taking photos with their macbook.
It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which, until recently, most people would use very rarely.
Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop would very much fall under irrational.
Apple is always searching for ways to get consumers to buy more of their hardware, so this does seem like a great way of entrenching users a little bit more.
What I didn't think about in my original comment is that their new solution makes use of two of the phones cameras (face view and the keyboard view)... I'm not sure consumers would be okay with THAT much hardware real estate being taken up by the addition of a wide angle lens (which is a really cool feature, albeit a bit is a gimmick for most). Though I'm sure Apple marketing could still make it generally desirable if they wanted to.
There's very little clearance in that direction, and the clearance which there is is necessary for the screen / lens not to touch the keyboard / case and get scratched.
So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to have a notch in the topcase.
And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge or below the screen), you need to have that notch through or below right below trackpad, which is less than optimally comfortable before you even consider that the accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the camera lens.
If Apple released a notch in the bottom side of their macbooks for a camera bump to fit in, everyone would be calling them visionary geniuses and they would use it to jack up the price 200 dollars more.
I have an Apple studio display. That thing is pretty new, thick and has an A something chip running iOS inside.
The camera quality is shit. Just garbage.
I don’t understand how they manage to do it. I understand your comment about laptop screens and it makes sense however none of the third party external webcams and even a non space constrained Apple webcam performs ok.
Would it be so weird? I mean: top corner/edge is less of a problem than bottom (nostril+big hands)
Assymertic? let's go nuts: two webcams, one on each side... suddenly, no notch, double the amount of light, stereoscopic vision. Combine that with some software processing and probably two very cheap sensors could produce decent results without bumping the price as a thin and tiny high quality sensor would.
They naturally are because there's just not much there, it's just an LCD.
Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume, making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much thicker).
It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush). Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that expense and inconvenience.
Hm. Interesting: you could put the battery in the screen making it quite a bit thicker, and then have the base thinner, that would change the balance though and it might not be as stable when sitting open on a desk. It'd be great to have a 20 hour life laptop though.
Or we could rearrange cooling so fans stay on the bottom of the machine with heat pipes leading up to behind the screen where the main board is
Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
This allows for a larger battery with more run time, better camera, and it should keep the balance of the machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
> I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.
Sony RX0.
The things with webcam is nobody want to spend any substantial amount of money on a third party usb webcam and nobody is willing to pay his laptop 10 or 20% more because it has a quality camera inside.
I think he means in order to fit a camera you need to increase the thickness of the laptops lid. Whether or not this leads to double the weight , idk but there is definitely a weight increase to fit the camera.
If they did mean it that way it still doesn't make sense to me. Where is the extra mass coming from? Are they just thickening the whole lid and fill it with solid lead? Mass comes from matter, if there isn't matter than there isn't mass. Adding a tiny camera, even if they did have to increase thickness a tiny bit of the entire lid it still wouldn't even come close to doubling the mass of the whole thing on an aluminum body laptop
It's simple math. To hold the camera housing of an iPhone camera the thickness has to go up which means the entire top lid needs to become thicker. This will easily double the weight of the laptop.
Only if that means using twice as much metal - I would expect instead it'd mean adding a thin strip of metal around the circumference of the lid. That would add a few grams, I'm sure, but hardly doubling.
> Now that I’ve used the webcam for myself, I can say that it’s woefully impractical. In order to actually have it looking at my face, I have to tilt the entire laptop up due to the fixed angle of the camera. It’s a cool idea, but probably shouldn’t have made its way to an actual retail product. People are likely to be super frustrated trying to use this webcam
Could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting here? You've unfortunately been breaking them quite a bit, such as with snark, flamebait, and ideological battle.
What we're hoping for on this site is curious conversation that remains thoughtful across differences. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Thats a good question. The answer is no, for two reasons:
(1) there's no clear way to distinguish "absurd claims that have no basis in reality" from statements that are simply false, and
(2) there's no clear way to distinguish false statements from true ones. We don't have a truth meter.
In the absence of clear criteria, what would we do? Decide what is true ourselves? Not possible—we're ludicrously unqualified, and the community would never support it. Also, I shudder to think of the karma one would incur.
Another factor is community. It would not serve community to ban people, or kill posts, for being wrong. A true community allows people to be wrong—belonging is about relatedness, not correctness—and a robust community would withstand wrongness the way a robust immune system withstands pathogens. I'm not saying that HN is either a true community or a robust community, yet, but that is the aspiration.
The 1080p laptop webcam that's in Apple's latest models is quite a decent camera that benefits from the ISP in Apple silicon. Even the ancient 720p camera hooked up to that ISP managed an incredible amount of improvement over the Intel models.
I'd also venture a guess that many other laptops' built-in webcams can outperform some of these dedicated units, not just the ones that are Apple's iPhone R&D beneficiaries.
"Mic audio is always trash" – again, try a newer Mac notebook model. Apple has been investing serious R&D into laptop microphones, and I think competitors are taking notice and making their own improvements.
It might sound crazy to buy a second phone for this kind of thing, but I do think there are people who will get a better value out of actually just buying a second iPhone as a webcam/streaming camera compared to buying a dedicated professional camera.
Unlike a mirrorless/DLSR camera, you can also acquire smartphones with deep carrier discounts and long, zero interest financing. So, presumably, you could buy yourself a new phone, and instead of trading in your old one you could use that as a streaming webcam.
Don't forget that iPhones aren't just $1000 luxury phones, Apple's cheapest new model is $429 and will stomp all over any dedicated webcam on this list. If you jump on the used market you can buy something like an iPhone 11 or XR for under $300 or $200 and still have a really solid webcam (as a bonus, you don't have to care about the condition of the battery).
Internal cams in laptops are considered commodities by the laptop manufacturers: they need to put any HD webcam in their product or no customer will buy it, but nobody picks a laptop model just because it has an excellent webcam.
External cameras like the Logitech 920 tested in the article have more than enough thickness to have better optics and better electronics than the cameras in phones.
Maybe this is out of ignorance, but just sort of assumed that’s how they keep it so cheap. Also the cameras on phones are arguably why people buy the phones they do at this point, or at the very least it’s a huge consideration given how frequently we use them. They also aren’t just for selfies and FaceTime or what have you, they’re also meant to be photography tools. They’ve completely replaced small consumer point and shoots. A laptop camera/webcam isn’t and can’t be that.
Apple introduced a new API in macOS 12.3 to create Core Media IO plug-ins that run out-of-process, this kind of new plug-in works in Safari and FaceTime too (Camo already uses the new API).
Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur, depending on your used lens. For power there are modified "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.
I have had no heating problems whatsoever. Mostly its been in use for 1-2 hour sessions at a time, occasionally longer. I do turn the camera off in between though, so it's not turned on 24/7.
Most annoying is a bug in the Canon webcam driver, if the camera is switched off, it displays a static image, which somehow fully occupies a single core on my machine. I would have thought encoding a still image into a video stream should be doable with less cpu cycles.
This is a confusion of terms. By "recording" people can mean both writing data to the card and activating the sensor to receive information. The latter is what overheats a camera, and the process is the same for both sending data directly to HDMI or recording it to a card. Some older sensors on Canon digital SLRs would actually begin to burn themselves out just by having the screen display what the sensor was receiving (also known as "live view") for more than about 10 minutes.
The lack of AF is a feature, not a bug. I replaced my AF lens with eye AF with a manual focus lens on my work webcam. The DoF zone indicates to other viewers if I should be conceptually "in focus" at that point in the meeting (i.e. I am speaking or directly engaging with the speaker). Otherwise I recline and go slightly out of focus.
That's a good idea actually, especially older DSLRs are quite cheap on the used market.
The problem is I'm more of a Nikon guy and I don't own any Canon lenses. But my Nikon body is an ancient D50 which doesn't have any of this fancy webcammy stuff. Or even video recording for that matter. And I don't know if newer Nikons have webcam features. But thanks for the tip, I'll investigate.
Even that cam would provide excellent images though with its 5mpx sensor.
Nikon[1] and Sony[2] also released software during the pandemic that turns any of their video recording DSLR/MILCs into webcams. I think a D50 might be a bit too old though since it doesn't have video recording.
Thanks, I'll have a look. But yeah I'll need a newer cam for sure.
The problem is that most of my lenses are 'screwdriver' models so if I upgrade I need to take one of the higher end models which can still drive this. This feature was removed on all the lower end ones over time.
If you have, like, 1960s Ai Nikkor 50mm F1.4 with a "crab nail", and if you don't need autofocus or program-auto aperture, they can be put onto basically any cameras by means of a passive adapter.
On the consumer side: not until people can actually afford casually dedicating the bandwidth necessary to deal with multiple 4k streams. Because either you need a truly monumentally liberal internet plan for sending uncompressed 4k at a normal frame rate, or you need a hardware encoder (baked in to your motherboard or discrete graphics card, or as separate purchase) to make sure you can send compressed 4k. And that only covers the sending part, you need to also receive and have the hardware capable of smoothly rendering the 4k video stream you're receiving.
But more importantly, on the industry side: given that live TV broadcasts are still 1080p, the answer here is almost certainly "not until the broadcasting world decides live 4k by default is even remotely worth it."
What's the financial incentive? Everyone who needs 4k streams is making money off them, and spends money on fancier camera gear. Most people just don't need it, so there's no money to be had.
It's hard finding a 60fps 1080p webcam that has a deep in focus region to minimize focus hunting and that isn't bad image quality, and that's way more useful.
I first saw this article years ago, and I'm glad to see it has been updated with some more modern webcams.
I'm also sad to see that the state of the art in this space hasn't changed much for webcams, especially on the Mac.
I do have an older iPhone 7 that I could put to use like this, but I'm starting to become convinced that maybe I actually do need to buy a somewhat newer iPhone device with multiple lenses, and use that instead -- for the same reason that my iPhone 7 is now obsolete for personal use and has since been replaced by an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
As a longtime, happy user of an iPhone 6S (on my third battery, second screen, and second charging port), I am curious as to why you consider the iPhone 7 to be obsolete for personal use. I know that later models have better screens, cameras, processors, etc., but I have a crisp Retina display and all functionality I use seems fine.
The entire reason why I dumped my iPhone 7 is that it can't keep up with the current version of iOS, and I needed something that could. So, I'd always be stuck on a device with a back rev version of iOS, and after a short while, security patches would stop being back ported.
Moreover, my employer requires that I use a device that is running the latest version of iOS and is fully patched, so the iPhone 7 is now simply a non-starter.
As for using it as a webcam, the camera and other hardware is old enough that I don't think I'd like it for that use, either.
So, it'll sit in a closet or on a shelf until I decide what to do with it, along with all the other old iPhones I have, going all the way back to the original iPhone.
> Using an iPhone as a webcam is easily the best option without dropping an excess of $1,000 for professional camera gear. Using the iPhone you already own, or a recent hand-me-down, a moderate investment in lighting, and Reincubate Camo, you can get excellent results and none of the frustration and hassle that accompanies standalone webcams.
I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is better than any of the webcams reviewed, I'm spending a couple hundred bucks at least. Then I need to spend $50/year or so on their Camo software.
For a couple hundred bucks I can get a used Sony Alpha, OBS is free. And arguably with effort I can make the Sony look much better.
This is a stretch, of course. The average person isn't going to fuck around with OBS.
Let's think of it another way. For <$100 you can have a webcam that works. It's better than nothing. Is an iPhone plus TFA's software better? Yes. Is it better proportional to the cost? Absolutely not. I'm not even convinced it's twice as good. I have some colleagues who use Camo, happily, but as a viewer in a Zoom meeting, I don't care. They're usually the size of a postage stamp on my screen. Most folks can't even upload full resolution streams of their cheap webcams in real-time.
Camo is cool, it's great that you can use your phone as a webcam, I love it, but "Why $90 webcams aren't as good as a $1000+ iPhone" would be a better title.
OBS camera won’t work in many MacOS programs nor will GoPro Webcam. It should be noted that the M1 MacBook Pro has a camera which is noticeably better than it used to be.
With gopro, it depends on the model and how you connect it.
I did use gopro (an older one, hero3) as a webcam, and it did work, to a point. Hero3 has hdmi output (not clean, but it dissapears after few seconds), so connecting it via hdmi capture dongle did work as a standard usb webcam in MacOS. The picture was great, the latency was under 10 frames when doing 60 fps capture. The problem was, that it could not charge and record at the same time, and it didn't give any signs of life when the battery was empty (other than signalling the charging). You could not even leave it powered, so it would charge when empty - it would notice only when you press some button, that it is empty and start charging. It was annoying to make sure the battery is charged enough when needed, so I just got an logitech webcam; the picture is worse, but just works, all the time, without babysitting.
With hero3 it is not a problem, see the very first sentence.
It does not stream over usb. There's no app to simulate webcam on the host operating system. Hero3 outputs hdmi, you use some hdmi-to-usb dongle, which are plain old USB UVC class devices and every operating system out there with usb support knows how to handle them. So if a logitech or whatever webcam works, this one will work too.
However, I see that hero9 has no hdmi out. That's the bummer.
For what it's worth, with the new macOS 13 and iOS 16 releases, you don't need Camo as it's built into the OS.
Of course the rest of your points still stand. The article does hinge on the user having an iPhone, and the comparison isn't entirely fair.
However I think the point of the article is to say that many people have devices on hand that will give better results than splurging on webcams which won't provide much gain
Which comment are you referring to? I can't find it. Whoever it is is wrong though; fuji stuff works better than anything else I've tried, except for dedicated cine cameras.
A7 is definitely a better pick but I use a A6000 as my webcam and haven’t had any issues with overheating.
My main annoyance with the A6000 is can’t charge and film at the same time so I had to buy a dummy battery pack power adapter which works but looks janky.
The simplicity of a normal webcam also has a huge value.
I hate waiting a few extra minutes at the beginning of a meeting while someone tries to get their complex webcam setup working. Some people can plan ahead and make it all work. Some people are always fighting with audio settings or restarting OBS or adjusting their webcam and so on. Wasted time for everyone involved.
I’m not looking forward to the new era of people messing with their iPhone mounts to their laptops to get the camera juuust right as we start every meeting.
Let’s just use the built-in webcams and get on with our meetings. Or if you want to use a fancy setup, you must have it all ready and tested before the meeting starts.
> I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is better than any of the webcams reviewed, I'm spending a couple hundred bucks at least. T
To be fair, he reviewed an iPhone so he recommended that. I think the advice is really more like "use the existing high powered camera you have in your pocket".
Unless someone is living under a rock (at least anyone in the use-phone-as-webcam territory), they probably have an Android phone if they don't have an iPhone.
Any decent Android phone should work too. I'm sure there are many apps enabling this. While they probably have worse image quality than iPhone, they'd definitely be much better than those cheapo webcams.
I did quite a lot of research to find a camera with decent picture quality in low light conditions. I do multiple work calls almost every evening. I ended up buying also a key light and a microphone. I think in this age of remote work, it’s the right thing to do for your colleagues to invest in this equipment. It’s kinda annoying when 20 people on the call cannot hear your or see you properly.
Well the first rule in photography is set up your lighting properly. Low light is hard for professionals. Don't expect good results in shitty lighting conditions. It's kind of important.
The logitech C920 can put out incredible video, if you have access to every setting. For some reason logitech puts the training wheels on and doesn't let you adjust every single setting like gain. There was an incredible app called "webcam settings" for mac that let you refine that webcam like putting a dslr into manual mode. I was able to get it so dialed in you thought it was a top of the line webcam. That software unfortunately is gone but sometimes it's not the hardware, it's the software. That said I refuse to pay monthly or yearly for software to use my phone as a webcam.
On linux you can use v4l2-ctl to fine tune the webcam settings (focus, gain, white balance, etc).
The C920 has really poor firmware, none of the auto settings work well. Auto focus is particularly bad.
I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings of my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions.
The low light performance of the C920 hardware is quite bad, but if you have adequate lighting and manually configure the setting you can get a pretty good setup.
The poor auto exposure and white balance touched on by this article really affected my webcam’s quality. A lamp in the background of my office caused my webcam to choose some setting that caused my face to be very red and blotchy.
I’m not being vain. People noticed it and it strained conversations. It’s harder to effectively communicate when your audience is uncomfortable by your appearance. Something to think about elsewhere in life.
But I digress. The Logitech software is horrible. I found CameraController [0] to adequately solve the problem. It allows me to adjust exposure and white balance. Now conversations feel more natural at work.
Here's a question: why do people care so much about what they look like or how the camera displays them? Personally, I care more about the content being delivered than what someone (including the scene) looks like.
> I care more about the content being delivered than what someone (including the scene) looks like.
IMO, we all want to believe that but we really don't. All other things being equal, a professional-looking setup will trump someone streaming from their messy bedroom unless the content is really that good, which it typically isn't. Conscious or not, first impressions are a thing.
This is the type of opinion that used to infuriate me as a young programmer, as I used to think that good code presented badly would win over bad code presented nicely. I can now admit that I was wrong, and I therefore always invest some time in making everything look as nice as possible. Making my delivery more professional has not shown any downsides yet.
I can’t speak for everyone obviously, but for me, lower quality setups are distracting and make it hard to focus on the material. Good setups “disappear” and let the content shine.
I think we only notice quality setup on video calls now because that one person that cares stands out.
Humans care in general, even if they think they don't. We respond better to higher quality rendition of facial expressions.
Google search has degraded so I can't find it, but I remember a couple years ago that a study showed people subconsciously associate image quality and lighting to status. People with better lighting look richer and of higher status.
There is a reason that for hundreds of years painters and (later) photographers have preferred working in spaces with North-facing windows[0], and that is because it's a simple way of ensuring neutral, even light. My home office is (by design) in a room with one North-facing window.
I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my webcam feed is. I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant, it's that if you know even a little about photography, you can do an awful lot to help ensure a good picture.
[0] assuming they were in the Northern Hemisphere, of course
Umm, it really depends where those lights are relative to the camera.
None of us look our best when light brightly from directly overhead, or from one side, or - if you're really after that Dracula look - from directly underneath.
The sun is a unique (free!) light source, particularly if you're able to get access through a North-facing window. It's quite costly (time and money) to get anywhere close to replicating that effect using artificial lighting.
Exactly. I put couple of Ikea Torsbo(? or something similar, can't remember the exact model) next to my monitor and they provide nice soft light to the face, which amazes some people. Literally spending 20€ on some cheap tabletop lamps would improve the quality dramatically for most of the people. I don't even have any fancy cameras, just a Logitech Streamcam I bought from some discount sale.
It blows people’s minds how much a few good practice suggestions change their image. I come from a film background and get requests for help by colleagues and friends constantly. I almost always just reposition their camera and move a lamp nearby to use as a key if they have no window, or as a kicker if they do.
It’s really easy to teach yourself this stuff, it’s not magic. Most people just assume their gear is either too cheap or they’re too ignorant to get it. 5-10min of research and 5-10min of implementation will do wonders for most people.
1) Avoid fluorescent lighting like the plague. You’ll look sickly.
2) Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your lighting is inadequate. It can be small it doesn’t matter. Place it diagonally from you at eye level.
3) Camera at eye level.
4) If you want to get fancy, get another lamp higher above you (several feet) and place it opposite your main lamp for a backlight. So if your main light is front right, this one is back left. It needs to be weaker than your main light source. This is called an “edge” or a backlight. It gives your hair a soft glow up top that separates you from the background.
Yeah that’s always a factor. If you can’t you can’t, simple as that. It just helps make you look less distracted as well as makes you “more flattering.” Definitely don’t have it angled up if you can avoid it or you look patronizing.
The top of your monitor should also be eye level, and slightly angled up, so you never look up, only straight or down. Better for your neck. If you're doing this, then your webcam will also be nearly eye level as well.
> Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your lighting is inadequate.
Just buy a high-CRI LED bulb from the hardware store.
It shouldn't necessarily be "warm". In an office only used during daylight, and lit with commercial lighting, a "warm" bulb is going to look extremely orange and out of place.
What matters most is matching color temperatures of your light sources.
Obviously you should find a color temperature that works for your setting, but in general, warm is a safer bet for preserving skin tones unless you are actively fighting daylight bulbs in the room.
Since warmer tones tend to be safer, I recommend it in the absence of more specifics about the environment. But you’re right, it’s not always the best fit.
Also the vast majority of people using these web cams don't have nearly enough lighting. When there isn't enough, the software cranks up the ISO to ridiculous level which gives that distinctive "webcam grain" look thats awful.
And working under insufficient light conditions is also likely worse for your eyes. So people would do themselves a favor working in brighter environments and also wouldn't have to worry as much from their webcam setup.
For me, in bright and evenly lit rooms (so no sunshine but artificial light), most dedicated webcams tend to produce pretty good images.
> I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant
I used to sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, and I often received compliments on my webcam quality when I used a C920e, which I think has the same quality as the C920.
Don't underestimate absolutely horrendous laptop webcams becoming normalized, especially after stream compression.
> I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my webcam feed is.
What's your secret for overcoming the C920's shitty color reproduction where the auto white balance makes everything extremely blue? I hate mine and am thinking about returning it as defective.
> What's your secret for overcoming the C920's shitty color reproduction where the auto white balance makes everything extremely blue?
You can disable all automatic settings and then you can manually configure things however you want based on your environment. The only issue is every time you reboot it tends to get reset.
Lighting and composition can do a lot to compensate for a weak camera, but read the post: this isn’t saying “Zoom video looks bad [potentially because of bad lighting and composition],” it’s saying “even high-end webcams are enormously worse than even old, low-end/front-facing cell phone cameras in the same conditions, and it’s not getting better.”
So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps. But this post is showing that a better (but similarly sized or even smaller) camera helps enormously, and the webcam market is persistently unwilling/unable to give them to us.
> So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps
$63 on a C920, add one window (typically ships free with your house/apartment) plus access to one truly special light source which although it's 93 million miles away you were lucky enough to get a free lifetime subscription to when you arrived on this planet.
Why spent time worrying about what a cell phone camera can achieve in poor or uneven lighting if a bog-standard webcam can do a really good job if you just fix the damned lighting?
It really needn't be. (Proper) photographers have been dealing with these very same issues for longer than we've all been worrying about how we look on Zoom.
Window Light: The Biggest, Bestest Softbox You Already Own:
"Let’s say your windows are west-facing and you want to shoot in the afternoon. And you’re really terrified of hard light. Keep thinking of your window as a softbox. You just need what they refer to in film production as a “silk”. The same material (ripstop nylon) that is found on the front of most softboxes can be placed in front of your window to turn hard, late day light into a glowing, golden, majestic light bath for your subject’s face."[0]
I think I understand your point, under ideal or almost ideal conditions most webcams can work fine.
However, most people are not graced with the understanding of lighting and how cameras work. There's lots of opportunity to compensate or at least guide people with better hardware and software. The work done with smartphone cameras is clear evidence of this.
I’m confused why you’re harping on about windows - which cannot be guaranteed in direction, location, size, or number in any house unless you build it yourself. Further, outside of the equatorial region, sunlight is also not guaranteed throughout the day during the year.
Clearly, your solution is neither “easy” nor optimal. Glad that it works for you, but it’s not for everyone.
Imagine the mind blowing privilege of not just having a separate home office, but having being able to design it to yoru exact specifications with a window facing north, and telling people to "just add windows". Some people on here are so out of touch.
The point of the article is that even a shitty old cell phone handily beats a "mid-range" C920 webcam. Yes, lighting conditions are important to photography, but, as the author demonstrates, cell phone cameras are better even in those scenarios. Furthermore, if you live in northern latitudes you get very little sunlight during the winter so a "window" is not a sufficient solution.
What they're saying is that if you live north enough, you're likely to be working during a time when there _is no sunlight_. A window does nothing when it's dark outside by the time your 4p.m. meeting comes around
My window faces onto a neighbour's house. They have painted this area white.
On my webcam, the window is behind me and it picks up this area outside the window and assumes the picture is overexposed because it doesn't expect to pick up large areas of basically #ffffff, and tries to dim the rest of the picture and darkens everything inside. Too much in fact, so it looks like I'm in a really dark room. The Logitech software does not support adjusting this behaviour, only adjusting the picture after the fact like the brightness sliders in your favourite image editor, so boosting them to compensate for the underexposed feed the webcam is providing the computer just results in a super washed out picture with still awful contrast.
I could rotate my office setup but then that introduces other issues, like glare on computer monitors or poor legroom due to radiator or insufficient space for a desk due to the neighbouring en suite cutout. I could close the curtains on the window and then just rely on electric light.
But these are all solutions worse than the problem of my webcam feed being underexposed, so they're not happening.
I wonder how you can work on your screen: the shining white window behind you should give large reflections that strain and fatigue (my) eyes very quickly.
My rule of thumb at workplace is no uncovered windows behind me.
Bright matte screens are pretty good at minimising reflections, plus with my current monitor angling the only one directly opposite the window has me between it and the window.
Man, he's just saying webcams are still shit, not that your pontification about light is wrong. Besides, how many of us get to choose the placement of our windows more easily than the camera we use?
Yes, all cameras look good with great natural light. That's not particularly interesting or useful, because we're not always in perfect lighting to compensate for mediocre cameras that've stagnated for 10 years.
>Why spent time worrying about what a cell phone camera can achieve in poor or uneven lighting if a bog-standard webcam can do a really good job if you just fix the damned lighting?
You are just being purposefully an ass. What about on a cloudly day, how does your sun help you then? What about at night? Not to mention most people don't have the luxury to arrange their home to optimize for picture quality on a fucking Zoom call.
Yes, you can help a shitty camera with lights, but we could just have good cameras. You can still fiddle with your lights until heat death of universe, but rest of us just want cameras that work even if we have to pay a little bit more.
One thing to remember about lightning: take your computer monitor into account :)
I have a bright (600 cd HDR) 32-inch monitor. I did a live streaming once (kind of online training) - the lightning was good most of the time, but when I tried to share some bright content on my screen (like a file, or web page with white background) the monitor would be so bright that my whole face would glow like a full moon :). I think next time I will use dark mode for all apps, or reduce screen brightness to minimum.
Indeed, if people cared enough, they'd be able to get amazing results out of any hardware.
I also have a window that faces North, I use the rule of thirds to better place myself in front of the camera, I only do video calls during the day, and I have a cat that can distract people at key moments.
My home office faces north and I do look alright on a webcam (T470 and now some kind of Thinkbook equivalent), but the dim light all day gives me SAD. I'm on the lookout for a few 4k lumen LED panels
Also, my experience with the 920
Is that it performs well (better than others I have) in low light. None of the samples from the article were low light. Most folks are in dimly lit conditions, and that’s where these tend to do better.
Fundamentally, webcams suffer from the same problem as n95 masks: prior to the pandemic, everything was geared towards cheap, it just wasn’t a huge market. To invest in retooling would be a risk, there is no guarantee the market will be there.
People are throwing a thousand dollars at phones with a significantly better profit margin. Webcams will NEVER catch up. He pretty much says this at the end of the article.
Taking an inexpensive used photo camera (of the regular mirrorless handheld type) and attaching it to your computer for video conferencing could be the most affordable solution.
With a North facing window, where does the camera sit to get the desired result? Asking because I have north facing windows only and I'm wondering if I could facilitate them better
Webcams feel like a deadend technology like self-rewinding cassettes on the eve of the release of the compact disc.
The fidelity is garbage relative to something like a DSLR inside an Errol Box[1] and miles away from Starline style holography[2]. Eye contact is poor. Putting in a software filter to fix eye contact should be universal practice at this point. Hell even getting basic ring light next to your lens is universal amongst gen-z streamers and completely absent from gen-x remote workers.
With the chip shortage mostly over I'm amused how many people working at MANGA, nominally our most proficient tech workers bringing in half a million dollar salaries, are just phoning it in with garbage setups, trivially fixed by watching a 15 minute youtube video on how to position your desk to capture natural light, use a wired microphone that you already have in your drawer somewhere, and check three boxes under settings.
I'm not proposing to get a studio, just maybe give your fellow humans the decency of picking up your emotional nuance if you're transitioning to not seeing them in person.
Not entirely sure if this was meant as satire, but in case it wasn't: If I wanted to be judged on my physical looks or the quality in which those are presented to others over the wire, I would have been working in the film industry.
Genuinely believe a loss in fidelity moves us from acceptable telepresence to uncanny valley.
Landlines had exceptional fidelity and let one pick up the nuance of a person's emotional state. Today's cellular connections not so much. Thankfully things like Apple Facetime (audio only) recapture some of that.
Likewise with a high quality webcam I think it's important to treat your coworkers with respect by giving them the grace of seeing your body language in high resolution if you're going to opt out of physical meetings. Remote work is fine, just don't phone it in with the equivalent of 2000's era potato camera.
I agree in that improved audiovisual quality would be beneficial, but, at least for regular video calls, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect for people to go out of their way to do better than the quality their (not too old) laptop provides - not past ensuring they're in a reasonably quiet environment with halfway decent lighting anyway.
Besides, recent generations of laptops are finally shifting to better quality webcams and microphones. We'll get to where we'd both like it to be, eventually :)
I grew up in similar times. What am I noticing is that only one model of cellphone (no adv) can give me a decent sound of my companion. But I did not have that mis-experience using very old phones.
Interesting, I'm curious, what phone/carrier was that? If you were able to get a decent sound on one phone, it sounds like then there's nothing intrinsically/insurmountably wrong with cell phones.
I intentionally scale down my video as I don't want to be seen. Being on video requires a lot of cognitive effort, which I'd rather conserve to do actual work.
You know what's vastly worse than a co-worker whose camera has a sub-optimal image quality? A co-worker who's constantly struggling to get their overkill setup to behave, wasting everyone's time while they fix the mix on their audio or switch cameras because their mirrorless camera turned itself off from thermal overload yet again.
Literally just use a wired microphone for instance and not only will one have better fidelity but one also immediately gets past the "Can you guys here me?" one finds with airpods or fancy wireless gaming headsets.
I am not sure. I looked for an answer but didn't see anything. It appears to behave like a perpetual subscription (meaning free upgrades) but I think you would have to contact the customer support team at the company to get the answers.
For a REALLY good webcam just get a Pi Zero (v1), Pi HQ camera, a good C-mount lens, and flash this firmware: https://piwebcam.github.io/
which makes the Pi Zero appear as a regular USB webcam when plugged in, and also gives you a telnet thing to control camera parameters.
It's particularly nice because it doesn't mount any filesystems in RW mode, so you can just plug and unplug it as needed.
There are also some enclosures you can 3D print for this combination.
This is a symptom of the race to the bottom in the digital camera industry. Most webcams are built around low cost modules running firmware developed by an OEM who made it good enough to ship and nothing more. They don't have any incentive to improve the features beyond banner specs and their buyers have little influence.
Mh, I wonder what article author think for webcam use cases... Personally I consider them useless 99% of the time in the sense that there is no need for video. When a video is needed 480p is enough, eventual dropped frames or artifacts does not matter much. If we really need hi resolution it's beyond webcam, something about YT, TV, ... not webcams anyway. If we need to share paper docs (LIM alike) it's better scan them before.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadAnyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.
That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.
(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)
OBS with virtual camera. Add the camera as a source, scale and crop to your heart's content, click 'start virtual camera', then launch your videoconferencing software and choose the virtual camera.
As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.
The first time we saw it there was a good lot of 'what the hell is this' before we even realised it was supposed to be a transcript, it was that bad. I'm not talking about just the odd bits replaced with weird words/phrases - the whole thing would be utter nonsense.
(And this was in Cambridge, not to say everybody was local (I'm not), but still, predominantly 'standard' not-straying-too-far-from-RP accents, it's not like it was some difficult niche regional accent & dialect that it couldn't understand.)
Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription [1].
While such features can be helpful, using them is rather different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a conversation.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions...
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing...
In a way, 720p or below is a non-vain version of applying a filter, smoothing imperfections away.
But a work meeting with 6 people and a presentation? Every participant's video will be shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207347086-Using-Gr...
You also need to have a higher plan to get 1080p video in some cases.
For the Zoom Pro account, you even have to contact Zoom Support to get them to enable 720p!
But a low-bitrate video that uses better-quality source pixels can still look much better than if used bad pixels as input.
Good color is kind of important though and usually not affected by bandwidth.
I think part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to know your audio/video sounds/looks crap to other people. For most users they won't have a clue until someone says "I can't hear you" lots of times.
Zoom doesn't even have a way to test your connection.
The only indication it gives you that people can't hear you is a "Your internet connection is unstable" warning and that doesn't really tell you much.
This is why movies still look really good even at surprisingly low bitrates (well one of the reasons, the other is of course unlimited time and lots of budget for tuning the compression which realtime applications don't have)
By the way, just using a Sony or Panasonic mirrorless is fine, you don't need to buy a custom high-end webcam, and you can use those for taking pictures and videos when you're out on the weekend.
Though you'd think with the WFH revolution there would be at least one company out there making a high-quality purpose-built webcam.
I bought a C920 on the basis of many shilled reviews, and I kneel to the power of their marketing department every time I turn that piece of junk on.
I use the bad Mac onboard for almost all work conferencing because it's right there and doesn't require me to occupy a port on the laptop for in the end just different bad video quality.
I have the same webcam I also bought the lg meetup for a larger room and it sucks - it especially sucks considering the price.
The Opal is a weak attempt to improve this, but includes a mic I don’t want (lots of decent separate mics exist). The mirrorless setup looks great, but with latency, capture cards, over heating, external battery packs, required camera arms etc. just a huge pain.
I wish apple would just make a good one again since nobody else seems capable of it.
The simple fact of the matter that the target for webcam seems to be to be either good enough or to be better than the competition. Neither of those are very high bars.
There are some improvements in webcam land. There's a trend towards more higher-quality consumer webcams even if they're ridiculously expensive for what they deliver.
One problem I have noticed with using phones as webcams is that often the image will look distorted if you're not right in the center of the camera. The closer you go towards the edges, the more your face will get distorted in width or in height. This is a natural consequence of how these tiny lenses are able to get such a wide picture so I can't really fault phone manufacturers for this, but it's something to keep in mind when you pick the more obvious solution and just stick your phone to your monitor.
The next macOS will have this capability baked in so I probably won’t need the third party software.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/412516/external-is...
Support though has been removed from Apple Silicon Macs :(
Would be a good project for someone to hack support back in.
It definitely does have some overheating issues, but it looks too good. I might use the shell and replace the guts with a Raspberry Pi powered camera [0] if I can actually get my hands on a Pi Zero with the shortage we have right now
[0] https://github.com/maxbbraun/pisight
Why? 480p does not sound better than today's mediocre webcams, does it have some amazing light balance or face detection for focus or something?
I would want to do this as well for shits and giggles, a 2003 webcam with 4 dongles being nearly on par with modern webcams is fun / hackery / a conversation starter, but I'm curious if it's more than just that. (My own ~2005 webcam simply connects with USB and works out of the box on any modern hardware running Linux. I suppose I didn't and don't think different enough.)
http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-isight
Great features too in the magnetic monitor attachment and the fancy aperture to close and turn off the camera.
The low resolution is somewhat appealing, in a retro way. If I'm going to be using a crappy external webcam it's cool that the image looks like an early 2000s PowerBook.
The camera's bundled FireWire 400 cable connects to a hard drive enclosure that also has a FireWire 800 port (the camera's cable is detachable so this could be replaced with a FireWire 400 to 800 cable). The FireWire 800 cable runs to a Thunderbolt 2 dock with a FireWire port and the dock's Thunderbolt 2 cable runs to a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter connected to an Intel MacBook Pro.
I like built-in, irised camera cover though by twisting it open/closed, I often shift the position slightly. The camera's stand sits on a box wedged between the wall and my monitor; I wish I had a slightly smaller box so the camera was a little lower, closer to the top of the monitor.
I had all these parts so it was a zero dollar way to get a camera above my external monitor. I might try the free version of EpocCam with an old iPhone (too old to work with Apple's forthcoming Continuity Camera feature) but that's bound to be more fussy to start/stop.
You can also use OBS Studio along with a virtual camera plugin to use any device which can output directly to your computer.
But most of these solutions do not work on Safari or FaceTime unless you manually modify the app.
Now, Apple is going to soon introduce their "It Just Works" solution with the next release of macOS and iOS. You will be able to use your iPhone's camera as a webcam wirelessly with your Mac by just sticking your phone on the back (Apple is partnering with Belkin[0] for this stand) [1]
I personally don't care about the camera as much as I care about the sound quality.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/6/23156834/apple-iphone-webc...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10018/
What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop
But yea, mic audio is always trash too
I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.
Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding, camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop. Phones are "always" (although that might not be true forever!) going to have more space for bigger and better lenses.
Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?
Exhibit A, this thread
They've been shifting design choices in a direction for years and this is what came of it. They could have made other choices but did not
It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which, until recently, most people would use very rarely.
Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop would very much fall under irrational.
What I didn't think about in my original comment is that their new solution makes use of two of the phones cameras (face view and the keyboard view)... I'm not sure consumers would be okay with THAT much hardware real estate being taken up by the addition of a wide angle lens (which is a really cool feature, albeit a bit is a gimmick for most). Though I'm sure Apple marketing could still make it generally desirable if they wanted to.
And that’s pretty annoying, a computer lid bump would snag into everything.
> And screens could be thicker where needed.
My phone’s thrice the thickness of my laptop’s lid.
This would increase the laptop’s thickness by a lot, and mostly by voids.
So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to have a notch in the topcase.
And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge or below the screen), you need to have that notch through or below right below trackpad, which is less than optimally comfortable before you even consider that the accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the camera lens.
The camera quality is shit. Just garbage.
I don’t understand how they manage to do it. I understand your comment about laptop screens and it makes sense however none of the third party external webcams and even a non space constrained Apple webcam performs ok.
It’s weird.
It's suspected it's because they're using a wide angle and cropping it tight to do the Center Stage feature.
It's pretty astonishing just how much they managed to screw up that monitor's webcam, but it's known to be terrible.
Would it be so weird? I mean: top corner/edge is less of a problem than bottom (nostril+big hands)
Assymertic? let's go nuts: two webcams, one on each side... suddenly, no notch, double the amount of light, stereoscopic vision. Combine that with some software processing and probably two very cheap sensors could produce decent results without bumping the price as a thin and tiny high quality sensor would.
Do they have to be?
Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume, making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much thicker).
It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush). Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that expense and inconvenience.
Iirc that was one of the SB’s issues which the hinge had to manage.
And things would probably be worse for a lid filled with battery.
Its balance is quite good.
Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
This allows for a larger battery with more run time, better camera, and it should keep the balance of the machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
There are options
Sony RX0.
The things with webcam is nobody want to spend any substantial amount of money on a third party usb webcam and nobody is willing to pay his laptop 10 or 20% more because it has a quality camera inside.
It will actually almost double the weight of the overall laptop if they added the same camera as they do on iPhone.
> Now that I’ve used the webcam for myself, I can say that it’s woefully impractical. In order to actually have it looking at my face, I have to tilt the entire laptop up due to the fixed angle of the camera. It’s a cool idea, but probably shouldn’t have made its way to an actual retail product. People are likely to be super frustrated trying to use this webcam
What we're hoping for on this site is curious conversation that remains thoughtful across differences. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(1) there's no clear way to distinguish "absurd claims that have no basis in reality" from statements that are simply false, and
(2) there's no clear way to distinguish false statements from true ones. We don't have a truth meter.
In the absence of clear criteria, what would we do? Decide what is true ourselves? Not possible—we're ludicrously unqualified, and the community would never support it. Also, I shudder to think of the karma one would incur.
There are other factors too. The mandate of HN is intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Curiosity needs the freedom to get things wrong sometimes. Finding the truth involves probing the edges.
Another factor is community. It would not serve community to ban people, or kill posts, for being wrong. A true community allows people to be wrong—belonging is about relatedness, not correctness—and a robust community would withstand wrongness the way a robust immune system withstands pathogens. I'm not saying that HN is either a true community or a robust community, yet, but that is the aspiration.
I'd also venture a guess that many other laptops' built-in webcams can outperform some of these dedicated units, not just the ones that are Apple's iPhone R&D beneficiaries.
"Mic audio is always trash" – again, try a newer Mac notebook model. Apple has been investing serious R&D into laptop microphones, and I think competitors are taking notice and making their own improvements.
It might sound crazy to buy a second phone for this kind of thing, but I do think there are people who will get a better value out of actually just buying a second iPhone as a webcam/streaming camera compared to buying a dedicated professional camera.
Unlike a mirrorless/DLSR camera, you can also acquire smartphones with deep carrier discounts and long, zero interest financing. So, presumably, you could buy yourself a new phone, and instead of trading in your old one you could use that as a streaming webcam.
Don't forget that iPhones aren't just $1000 luxury phones, Apple's cheapest new model is $429 and will stomp all over any dedicated webcam on this list. If you jump on the used market you can buy something like an iPhone 11 or XR for under $300 or $200 and still have a really solid webcam (as a bonus, you don't have to care about the condition of the battery).
Laptops rarely have decent cams, because phones are afforded a greater thickness than the typical location of a laptop camera(above the screen).
The webcam in my macbook has about 1/8" to work with, whereas my phone camera has almost 1/3"
They just don't.
Maybe this is out of ignorance, but just sort of assumed that’s how they keep it so cheap. Also the cameras on phones are arguably why people buy the phones they do at this point, or at the very least it’s a huge consideration given how frequently we use them. They also aren’t just for selfies and FaceTime or what have you, they’re also meant to be photography tools. They’ve completely replaced small consumer point and shoots. A laptop camera/webcam isn’t and can’t be that.
http://www.pxtl.ca/2020/04/08/ip-webcam/
An open bookshelf with varied unaligned books looks better behind you than acoustic foam, an still suppresses echo well enough.
Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur, depending on your used lens. For power there are modified "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.
Most annoying is a bug in the Canon webcam driver, if the camera is switched off, it displays a static image, which somehow fully occupies a single core on my machine. I would have thought encoding a still image into a video stream should be doable with less cpu cycles.
Sony A7 series - no.
Fujifilm, any version - no.
Based on my (sparse) experience.
Basically, you can’t just buy a random mirrorless or SLR camera and hope it works. You have to pick from a smaller list of known-good setups.
Any recommendations for the cheapest second hand SLR one can buy to have streamer quality webcam feeds?
Hopefully in a few years we will have cheap versions with excellent AF.
Many are jealous, i think. It's hard to understand through their poor webcams haha
The problem is I'm more of a Nikon guy and I don't own any Canon lenses. But my Nikon body is an ancient D50 which doesn't have any of this fancy webcammy stuff. Or even video recording for that matter. And I don't know if newer Nikons have webcam features. But thanks for the tip, I'll investigate.
Even that cam would provide excellent images though with its 5mpx sensor.
1: https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/webcam-utility...
2: https://imagingedge.sony.net/en-us/ie-webcam.html
> DSLR/MILC
The problem is that most of my lenses are 'screwdriver' models so if I upgrade I need to take one of the higher end models which can still drive this. This feature was removed on all the lower end ones over time.
50mm is a bit too narrow on a crop sensor though for the distance I'm sitting from the display.
https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/canon-dslr-webcam-debian...
But more importantly, on the industry side: given that live TV broadcasts are still 1080p, the answer here is almost certainly "not until the broadcasting world decides live 4k by default is even remotely worth it."
It's hard finding a 60fps 1080p webcam that has a deep in focus region to minimize focus hunting and that isn't bad image quality, and that's way more useful.
I'm also sad to see that the state of the art in this space hasn't changed much for webcams, especially on the Mac.
I do have an older iPhone 7 that I could put to use like this, but I'm starting to become convinced that maybe I actually do need to buy a somewhat newer iPhone device with multiple lenses, and use that instead -- for the same reason that my iPhone 7 is now obsolete for personal use and has since been replaced by an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Camo looks nice!
Moreover, my employer requires that I use a device that is running the latest version of iOS and is fully patched, so the iPhone 7 is now simply a non-starter.
As for using it as a webcam, the camera and other hardware is old enough that I don't think I'd like it for that use, either.
So, it'll sit in a closet or on a shelf until I decide what to do with it, along with all the other old iPhones I have, going all the way back to the original iPhone.
Why is the conclusion that the hardware is bad, not that the method of using the hardware is bad?
> Using an iPhone as a webcam is easily the best option without dropping an excess of $1,000 for professional camera gear. Using the iPhone you already own, or a recent hand-me-down, a moderate investment in lighting, and Reincubate Camo, you can get excellent results and none of the frustration and hassle that accompanies standalone webcams.
I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is better than any of the webcams reviewed, I'm spending a couple hundred bucks at least. Then I need to spend $50/year or so on their Camo software.
For a couple hundred bucks I can get a used Sony Alpha, OBS is free. And arguably with effort I can make the Sony look much better.
This is a stretch, of course. The average person isn't going to fuck around with OBS.
Let's think of it another way. For <$100 you can have a webcam that works. It's better than nothing. Is an iPhone plus TFA's software better? Yes. Is it better proportional to the cost? Absolutely not. I'm not even convinced it's twice as good. I have some colleagues who use Camo, happily, but as a viewer in a Zoom meeting, I don't care. They're usually the size of a postage stamp on my screen. Most folks can't even upload full resolution streams of their cheap webcams in real-time.
Camo is cool, it's great that you can use your phone as a webcam, I love it, but "Why $90 webcams aren't as good as a $1000+ iPhone" would be a better title.
I did use gopro (an older one, hero3) as a webcam, and it did work, to a point. Hero3 has hdmi output (not clean, but it dissapears after few seconds), so connecting it via hdmi capture dongle did work as a standard usb webcam in MacOS. The picture was great, the latency was under 10 frames when doing 60 fps capture. The problem was, that it could not charge and record at the same time, and it didn't give any signs of life when the battery was empty (other than signalling the charging). You could not even leave it powered, so it would charge when empty - it would notice only when you press some button, that it is empty and start charging. It was annoying to make sure the battery is charged enough when needed, so I just got an logitech webcam; the picture is worse, but just works, all the time, without babysitting.
It does not stream over usb. There's no app to simulate webcam on the host operating system. Hero3 outputs hdmi, you use some hdmi-to-usb dongle, which are plain old USB UVC class devices and every operating system out there with usb support knows how to handle them. So if a logitech or whatever webcam works, this one will work too.
However, I see that hero9 has no hdmi out. That's the bummer.
Of course the rest of your points still stand. The article does hinge on the user having an iPhone, and the comparison isn't entirely fair.
However I think the point of the article is to say that many people have devices on hand that will give better results than splurging on webcams which won't provide much gain
My main annoyance with the A6000 is can’t charge and film at the same time so I had to buy a dummy battery pack power adapter which works but looks janky.
I hate waiting a few extra minutes at the beginning of a meeting while someone tries to get their complex webcam setup working. Some people can plan ahead and make it all work. Some people are always fighting with audio settings or restarting OBS or adjusting their webcam and so on. Wasted time for everyone involved.
I’m not looking forward to the new era of people messing with their iPhone mounts to their laptops to get the camera juuust right as we start every meeting.
Let’s just use the built-in webcams and get on with our meetings. Or if you want to use a fancy setup, you must have it all ready and tested before the meeting starts.
To be fair, he reviewed an iPhone so he recommended that. I think the advice is really more like "use the existing high powered camera you have in your pocket".
LOL what? Is this true?
Any decent Android phone should work too. I'm sure there are many apps enabling this. While they probably have worse image quality than iPhone, they'd definitely be much better than those cheapo webcams.
I think the guy wanted to do a kickstarter to disrupt the industry (and 90% of the HN comments were telling him he would fail).
The C920 has really poor firmware, none of the auto settings work well. Auto focus is particularly bad.
I wrote a quick script which hard locks all of the settings of my C920 to the optimal values for my office conditions.
The low light performance of the C920 hardware is quite bad, but if you have adequate lighting and manually configure the setting you can get a pretty good setup.
Yeah I have the same. I have saved settings from guvcview which are loaded after boot and after resume from suspend.
I’m not being vain. People noticed it and it strained conversations. It’s harder to effectively communicate when your audience is uncomfortable by your appearance. Something to think about elsewhere in life.
But I digress. The Logitech software is horrible. I found CameraController [0] to adequately solve the problem. It allows me to adjust exposure and white balance. Now conversations feel more natural at work.
[0] https://github.com/Itaybre/CameraController
IMO, we all want to believe that but we really don't. All other things being equal, a professional-looking setup will trump someone streaming from their messy bedroom unless the content is really that good, which it typically isn't. Conscious or not, first impressions are a thing.
This is the type of opinion that used to infuriate me as a young programmer, as I used to think that good code presented badly would win over bad code presented nicely. I can now admit that I was wrong, and I therefore always invest some time in making everything look as nice as possible. Making my delivery more professional has not shown any downsides yet.
I think we only notice quality setup on video calls now because that one person that cares stands out.
Google search has degraded so I can't find it, but I remember a couple years ago that a study showed people subconsciously associate image quality and lighting to status. People with better lighting look richer and of higher status.
It's unfortunate, but it's unsurprising.
I use a Logitech C920. Many people have told me how good my webcam feed is. I don't think it's that the C920 is particularly brilliant, it's that if you know even a little about photography, you can do an awful lot to help ensure a good picture.
[0] assuming they were in the Northern Hemisphere, of course
Umm, it really depends where those lights are relative to the camera.
None of us look our best when light brightly from directly overhead, or from one side, or - if you're really after that Dracula look - from directly underneath.
The sun is a unique (free!) light source, particularly if you're able to get access through a North-facing window. It's quite costly (time and money) to get anywhere close to replicating that effect using artificial lighting.
It’s really easy to teach yourself this stuff, it’s not magic. Most people just assume their gear is either too cheap or they’re too ignorant to get it. 5-10min of research and 5-10min of implementation will do wonders for most people.
1) Avoid fluorescent lighting like the plague. You’ll look sickly.
2) Find a nice warm (tungsten/more orange) lamp if your lighting is inadequate. It can be small it doesn’t matter. Place it diagonally from you at eye level.
3) Camera at eye level.
4) If you want to get fancy, get another lamp higher above you (several feet) and place it opposite your main lamp for a backlight. So if your main light is front right, this one is back left. It needs to be weaker than your main light source. This is called an “edge” or a backlight. It gives your hair a soft glow up top that separates you from the background.
Just buy a high-CRI LED bulb from the hardware store.
It shouldn't necessarily be "warm". In an office only used during daylight, and lit with commercial lighting, a "warm" bulb is going to look extremely orange and out of place.
What matters most is matching color temperatures of your light sources.
Since warmer tones tend to be safer, I recommend it in the absence of more specifics about the environment. But you’re right, it’s not always the best fit.
For me, in bright and evenly lit rooms (so no sunshine but artificial light), most dedicated webcams tend to produce pretty good images.
I used to sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, and I often received compliments on my webcam quality when I used a C920e, which I think has the same quality as the C920.
Don't underestimate absolutely horrendous laptop webcams becoming normalized, especially after stream compression.
What's your secret for overcoming the C920's shitty color reproduction where the auto white balance makes everything extremely blue? I hate mine and am thinking about returning it as defective.
You can disable all automatic settings and then you can manually configure things however you want based on your environment. The only issue is every time you reboot it tends to get reset.
So yes, all things being equal, better lighting helps. But this post is showing that a better (but similarly sized or even smaller) camera helps enormously, and the webcam market is persistently unwilling/unable to give them to us.
$63 on a C920, add one window (typically ships free with your house/apartment) plus access to one truly special light source which although it's 93 million miles away you were lucky enough to get a free lifetime subscription to when you arrived on this planet.
Why spent time worrying about what a cell phone camera can achieve in poor or uneven lighting if a bog-standard webcam can do a really good job if you just fix the damned lighting?
"Just" fixing some problems can be a luxury.
It really needn't be. (Proper) photographers have been dealing with these very same issues for longer than we've all been worrying about how we look on Zoom.
Window Light: The Biggest, Bestest Softbox You Already Own:
"Let’s say your windows are west-facing and you want to shoot in the afternoon. And you’re really terrified of hard light. Keep thinking of your window as a softbox. You just need what they refer to in film production as a “silk”. The same material (ripstop nylon) that is found on the front of most softboxes can be placed in front of your window to turn hard, late day light into a glowing, golden, majestic light bath for your subject’s face."[0]
[0] https://fstoppers.com/education/window-light-biggest-bestest...
However, most people are not graced with the understanding of lighting and how cameras work. There's lots of opportunity to compensate or at least guide people with better hardware and software. The work done with smartphone cameras is clear evidence of this.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case for most people.
Clearly, your solution is neither “easy” nor optimal. Glad that it works for you, but it’s not for everyone.
Perhaps I wasn't clear: a North-facing window never gets direct sunlight, but doesn't matter because we're after neutral, even light.
Certainly not "direct light", not even "lots of light".
Just neutral, even light. It's worked for artists for centuries.
On my webcam, the window is behind me and it picks up this area outside the window and assumes the picture is overexposed because it doesn't expect to pick up large areas of basically #ffffff, and tries to dim the rest of the picture and darkens everything inside. Too much in fact, so it looks like I'm in a really dark room. The Logitech software does not support adjusting this behaviour, only adjusting the picture after the fact like the brightness sliders in your favourite image editor, so boosting them to compensate for the underexposed feed the webcam is providing the computer just results in a super washed out picture with still awful contrast.
I could rotate my office setup but then that introduces other issues, like glare on computer monitors or poor legroom due to radiator or insufficient space for a desk due to the neighbouring en suite cutout. I could close the curtains on the window and then just rely on electric light.
But these are all solutions worse than the problem of my webcam feed being underexposed, so they're not happening.
My rule of thumb at workplace is no uncovered windows behind me.
How do I add a new window to my apartment??
Yes, all cameras look good with great natural light. That's not particularly interesting or useful, because we're not always in perfect lighting to compensate for mediocre cameras that've stagnated for 10 years.
Damn that's cheap, where's that price from?
You are just being purposefully an ass. What about on a cloudly day, how does your sun help you then? What about at night? Not to mention most people don't have the luxury to arrange their home to optimize for picture quality on a fucking Zoom call.
Yes, you can help a shitty camera with lights, but we could just have good cameras. You can still fiddle with your lights until heat death of universe, but rest of us just want cameras that work even if we have to pay a little bit more.
I have a bright (600 cd HDR) 32-inch monitor. I did a live streaming once (kind of online training) - the lightning was good most of the time, but when I tried to share some bright content on my screen (like a file, or web page with white background) the monitor would be so bright that my whole face would glow like a full moon :). I think next time I will use dark mode for all apps, or reduce screen brightness to minimum.
I also have a window that faces North, I use the rule of thirds to better place myself in front of the camera, I only do video calls during the day, and I have a cat that can distract people at key moments.
People always say my video looks brilliant.
I only use my Panasonic X2000 as a webcam.
Fundamentally, webcams suffer from the same problem as n95 masks: prior to the pandemic, everything was geared towards cheap, it just wasn’t a huge market. To invest in retooling would be a risk, there is no guarantee the market will be there.
People are throwing a thousand dollars at phones with a significantly better profit margin. Webcams will NEVER catch up. He pretty much says this at the end of the article.
The fidelity is garbage relative to something like a DSLR inside an Errol Box[1] and miles away from Starline style holography[2]. Eye contact is poor. Putting in a software filter to fix eye contact should be universal practice at this point. Hell even getting basic ring light next to your lens is universal amongst gen-z streamers and completely absent from gen-x remote workers.
With the chip shortage mostly over I'm amused how many people working at MANGA, nominally our most proficient tech workers bringing in half a million dollar salaries, are just phoning it in with garbage setups, trivially fixed by watching a 15 minute youtube video on how to position your desk to capture natural light, use a wired microphone that you already have in your drawer somewhere, and check three boxes under settings.
I'm not proposing to get a studio, just maybe give your fellow humans the decency of picking up your emotional nuance if you're transitioning to not seeing them in person.
[1] https://ma.tt/2020/05/ceo-video-streaming
[2] https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
Landlines had exceptional fidelity and let one pick up the nuance of a person's emotional state. Today's cellular connections not so much. Thankfully things like Apple Facetime (audio only) recapture some of that.
Likewise with a high quality webcam I think it's important to treat your coworkers with respect by giving them the grace of seeing your body language in high resolution if you're going to opt out of physical meetings. Remote work is fine, just don't phone it in with the equivalent of 2000's era potato camera.
I agree in that improved audiovisual quality would be beneficial, but, at least for regular video calls, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect for people to go out of their way to do better than the quality their (not too old) laptop provides - not past ensuring they're in a reasonably quiet environment with halfway decent lighting anyway.
Besides, recent generations of laptops are finally shifting to better quality webcams and microphones. We'll get to where we'd both like it to be, eventually :)
Literally just use a wired microphone for instance and not only will one have better fidelity but one also immediately gets past the "Can you guys here me?" one finds with airpods or fancy wireless gaming headsets.
Its pretty nice in my opinion, have been using it the last 2 years without a flaw
It's particularly nice because it doesn't mount any filesystems in RW mode, so you can just plug and unplug it as needed.
There are also some enclosures you can 3D print for this combination.