Some people are not satisfied with a webcam from their notebook or an old webcam
they bought many years ago.
My brother decided he wants to try streaming. Some people can just do a thing
and other people want to research all the bits and pieces beforehand. Our chat
history is comparable in length to all my other chats combined, so I learned a
lot of it as well. The craft is full with small details and inconveniences.
He found that there are basically no good webcams. A lot of the time an image
quality is meh, and the rare presence of 4k is usually not better than 1080p,
because resolution is not quality. Some camera apparently does upscaling from
1080p to 4k in its driver, indicated by poor quality and high CPU load. He also
has a really good camera, Fujifilm X-T1. It can’t be used as a webcam when
connected to a USB port. Usually it’s possible to buy an HDMI-to-USB converter,
but his camera can’t output a live stream into HDMI, only a recorded video.
So we had an idea — maybe it is possible to create a good webcam
ourselves. Would anybody care? Well, it’s almost 2021 now, streaming is still on
the rise, pandemic is going strong and video meetings are everywhere. People are
willing to spend some money, as indicated by countless videos on YouTube
regarding the problem.
Let’s start with defining what is a good webcam.
A good webcam, in my opinion, is a device that provides a decent sound quality,
at least on par with recent MacBooks, and an image quality on par with top
smartphones, such as iPhone 11/12, Huawei P40 Pro, etc. As smartphones have a
good image quality, then we could probably manufacture a webcam from smartphone
parts that are cheap and easily available. How hard can it be?
If you’ve read at least a couple of articles on the topic of video production,
you will know that to make quality content from the technical standpoint you
need three things, in that particular order:
- Sound
- Light
- Video quality
Let’s discuss these properties and later how to manufacture it.
Sound🔗
If you have a recent MacBook, it provides a decent sound quality with its
three-mic array. I haven’t researched it and don’t know much about other
notebooks’ audio quality. If you have a desktop PC, you have to have some
external mic anyway.
If the web camera has shitty audio quality, you’ll have to buy additional
gear. When I researched the topic, one of the recently released webcams
(available from October 2020) with RRP of $180 was producing a sound as if a
person sits in a big plastic barrel with a closed lid. Their voice was very
muffled with lots of resonant rattles. That level of quality wasn’t acceptable
10 years ago, how this piece of gear could have been produced in 2020 escapes my
understanding.
There are many good enough USB mics for $50+, you also can buy a great XLR
microphone for $100, but then you’ll need an external sound card with phantom
power supply. A decent one can easily cost you $200.
With almost any of these options you’ll have to install and configure some
software that will provide sound level compression, noise suppression (because
your notebook fans are spinning like hell) and won’t produce clicks in the
process.
I would like my webcam to do this by itself, no rattling, minimized echo, etc.
Light🔗
A lot of what makes a picture great comes from lighting the scene in a correct way.
The simplest thing is to sit in a room so the window is in front of you and the
Sun isn’t shining into a lens from behind your shoulder.
Webcam cannot provide decent lighting capabilities by itself, so I won’t spend
much time here. There is a webcam by
Razer
with a built-in
