为什么网络摄像头不够好

Unfassbar guter Artikel! Und ich hätte ihn so gerne gelesen, bevor ich alle meine Tests gemact hatte:-( Ich habe ein iPhone SE (nutze als Software die Epo Cam Pro) und dachte mir, ich kaufe mir jetzt mal eine ordentliche Kamera. Habe mich dann im Sinne Preis/Leistung für die Logitech C920 entschieden. Und war von Anfang an damit unzufrieden - v.a. wegen der Überbelichtung. Hab dann die Software runtergeladen, in den Einstellungen ohne Ende Varianten ausprobiert und auch in zoom (soweit das möglich ist). Das Ergebnis war: maximal unbefriedigend. So denn: Konsequenz: Logitech 920 schick ich zurück und bleibe bei meine "alten" iPhone SE :-). Positiver Effekt: Günstiger geht es nicht (iphone lag eh bei uns rum). NOCHMAL DANKE AN DEN TOLLEN, AUSFÜHRLICHEN UND VERSTÄNDLICHEN BERICHT! (spart hoffentlich Geld und Material für "sinnlosen" WebCam-Kauf).

Why is everyone puzzled? Yes I had a 2012 or 2013 laptop, had a great built in webcam. Now they all stink. This is a marketing decision: corporate greed. They decided to built them with cheap cameras, that's all. It either got too expensive (really they found a way to do it cheap, the hell with quality) and everyone is stuck. It's standard operating business procedure. Like food nowadays. They found cheaper and cheaper ways to raise/produce it, so the hell with the quality. And you pay more. Whole Foods did it to its fine quality sirloin and hamburger. You're simply stuck.

A parallel story exists for audio: it's impossible to find a device for a computer that uses multiple microphones to actively cancel background noise, like pretty much every flagship phone does. My old Pixel 3 phone had an extra pinhole mic that allowed me to stand next to a lawnmower without the person on the other end of the call noticing. It would subtract out the external noise from the pinhole mic, leaving just my voice coming through clear on the main mic. Not sure why this is so hard for someone to sell as a standalone device.

The actual problem lies in the fact that nobody in the actual camera industry makes web camera houses with a good sensor, so you can put any of their lenses on and actually get photographic quality. Sorry but Logitech is not a camera company and their plastic lenses and tiny sensors are still stuck in the 80ies.

Great article and detailed. I might add that the video card being used in the computer is also a factor. I didn't see it mentioned but I apologize if I didn't see it.

Great article. I am also very surprised how overrated the c920 is. Also I noticed that the same webcame reacts differently depending on the software: the result using Logitech App is generally correct. Using MS Teams, the image gets blurred without any option to handle it!

I bought a Brio, as pretty much the most expensive webcam you can get, hoping it would be a bit better than the cheaper webcams, but it isn't really. Apart from the image quality failings mentioned here, the most frustrating aspect is the software (which I've only tried on a Mac). It continually defaults to a state of terrible over-exposure in the conditions I use it in, and, worse, to 720p. Why on earth do Logitech do this? It should be obvious to them that people buying their most expensive camera will want to normally create HD video, but the software still keeps defaulting to 720p. So all my projects end up with a mixture of 720p and 1080p, when I remember to switch that switch again.

Great article! Can you do baby monitors next? They universally suck.

Found this via Daring Fireball and just wanted to thank you for this incredibly comprehensive article. Not having a lot of technical knowledge about cameras/video, I ordered the highly recommended Logitech C920 and thought I was going insane when it didn't hold a candle to a quick comparison with my iPhone 8... not to mention pulling my hair out for nearly a full day installing and uninstalling Logitech's various webcam apps before finally realizing the cam worked much better without them.

Thanks for this lengthy review. I finally understand why that market still looks so bad even today!

This is really absurd and not just because chips got much better for much cheaper but because in a world caught in the middle of the major pandemic, no company came with a great product. It is AMAZING and stupid. Everybody sees everyday how bad the image is... and i can't believe there is no market between a 100$ devices and 2K$ to 15K$.

Do you remember the iSight from Apple introduced in 2003??? The design was great and the quality for the time was excellent compared to competition for a 149$ (cheap for an Apple product). Image quality was great and speed amazing thanks to a FireWire connection (400 Mbit/s in 2003!). I kept it until 2010 or so.

Anyway, I'm puzzled and can't understand why manufacturers don't do something better in this period, honestly.

Thanks again for putting this up!

Thanks for this lengthy review. I finally understand why that market still looks so bad even today!

This is really absurd and not just because chips got much better for much cheaper but because in a world caught in the middle of the major pandemic, no company came with a great product. It is AMAZING and stupid. Everybody sees everyday how bad the image is... and i can't believe there is no market between a 100$ devices and 2K$ to 15K$.

Do you remember the iSight from Apple introduced in 2003??? The design was great and the quality for the time was excellent compared to competition for a 149$ (cheap for an Apple product). Image quality was great and speed amazing thanks to a FireWire connection (400 Mbit/s in 2003!). I kept it until 2010 or so.

Anyway, I'm puzzled and can't understand why manufacturers don't do something better in this period, honestly.

Thanks again for putting this up!

Thank you for the great article. How would you expect the Mevo Start to compare as a webcam?

If you were a pundit who appears regularly on cable TV shows (and, therefore has plenty of money) what setup would you buy?

• Camera
• Light, Lights
• Microphone

What do you think of the new Avermedia PW513 webcam? This is based on a much more modern Sony Exmor Sensor with a higher dynamic range and I think addresses most of the points you raised. It's even dropping in price now to semi-reasonable levels.

I know it's a different type of device but can you please test the Facebook Portal 10 inch (1st gen)? Apparently it has an impressive 13 megapixel camera that's also 140 degrees wide angle. It's available on eBay for around $80 and only the first gen model or the 15 inch Portal Plus has USB-C video out too, to a bigger screen. I want to know how it compares to the Logitech BRIO and the iPhone SE and the iPhone 11 Pro.

I agree wholly. I used to use Logitech C920s for televising Vex robotics tournaments. A C920 on a lighting tripod overlooking each field of play connected to a Raspberry Pi (used Pi 2Bs the first few years) strapped to tripod post powered by a PoE dongle, and simply using gstreamer to take the h.264 stream from the USB and sent it RTP to the video mixer. For less than $100 for each field of play, had great picture all run off a single Ethernet cable.... when we went to three fields of play and I went to add a camera, I was disappointed in the new Logitech C920 that no longer had the H.264 stream. Even going to the Pi 3 to handling encoding, the image on that one was never as good as the older C920s. I think it is just Logitech getting cheap.

The exception this trend: document cameras. They still have onboard processing, sometimes with built in LEDs, exposure/zoom buttons, and often better sensors than smaller webcams; a good example is the IPEVO line. Granted, they don't clip on to your computer, but the adjustable arm can be pretty convenient as well. The only drawback is that because it doesn't clip on, looking at your screen and looking at your camera aren't always the same thing; but depending on the setup, you can just have the camera peek over the top of the monitor.

Charlie Hayes is correct. Old cameras compressed the video to save USB bandwidth. But doing that both increased the CPU burden and reduced the video quality. The CPU or GPU must decode the video to display the stream. And unless you are saving the video in the exact format that the camera sent it, the CPU has to decode and re-encode the stream. That's especially important for streamers who are removing a background and overlaying their video over a game stream and muxing the audio from a standalone microphone. So the cameras compression hurt more than it helped.

What about using that drone as a web cam? How would that look?

I’ve been wondering if a GoPro camera is a good option, as it obviously offers great versatility for other uses. Can it be used as a webcam?

Thanks for this article. I've wanted to start streaming some of the making I do, which meant I went out and bought a couple of Logitech C922x Pro cameras. One was intended to be mounted over my lab bench pointing down. The results were abysmal. The bench is well-lit, and yet darks were black voids and lights were blown out.

Asking around, I learned most people use some form of DSLR or mirrorless camera. A smaller subset of the available ones can stream over USB (and probably smaller still with the low latency needed for live streaming). They're all $600+.

Then the new Raspberry Pi HQ camera caught my attention, and I started looking at industrial USB cameras. Eventually I found a cheap Chinese import. The advantage to a C/CS-mount camera is that there are a lot of interchangeable lenses available, some quite inexpensive (quality remains to be seen). But more importantly, I can manually control focus and (optical) zoom, a real boon when shooting my bench. Even my old iPhone can't offer me that.

This particular camera (and other cheap ones I've seen) are UVC-compliant, meaning most OSes support them out of the box. I tried this one briefly, and it out-performed the Logitech with the stock configuration, but latency is not as good (still passable, if you don't buffer in OBS). There's some source code out there for adjusting camera parameters on macOS, I'm gonna write a little utility to access those and see if I can improve it.

All that long-winded comment to ask: mind comparing this camera to your others? Thanks!

I suspect the reason to encode the video in the camera is less an effort to save the computation from the computer and more a requirement to get through the limited USB 2.0 bandwidth.