[chrisweekly]

I don't understand the business model / viability of dedicated webcams. Software like Elgato Epoccam or OBS is free or cheap, and the % of people who would benefit from a decent webcam and who don't own a modern smartphone is literally 0.

[andrepew]

People who have video calls throughout the day constantly. I don't want to have to mess around setting up my phone on a stand and getting it connected every time I need to do a meeting.

[goosedragons]

Buy an actual camera and use that instead? Basically every camera that has video out is pretty easy to get working as a webcam these days.

[raesene9]

I would sound a slight note of caution there, in that AFAIK not every camera has clean HDMI out and there can be challenges about powering cameras for longer periods of time (if needed).

It is a good option though if you need higher quality. I'm using a Sony ZV-1 and it's worked out pretty well.

[1123581321]

Those cost more. It doesn’t make sense to spend more than needed on something you’re only going to use as a webcam. Webcams don’t have to spend on holdability or physical durability or any viewfinding.

[mbreese]

I also dual call into many meetings. For these, I use my phone to see how my screen sharing is working. I have to do a lot of screen sharing presentations to present data (tables, figures, etc). With this use-case, it’s very helpful to have a second login to be able to see what everyone else is.

[ghaff]

Or I’m in a group meeting and I see a text or even a phone call I want to quickly respond to. Apple’s demo at WWDC seems interesting but not sure how much I would actually use it unless it was to partially repurpose an old phone.

As for cameras, I got things setup with my Canon 5Diii but it was way too much trouble to use given even pre-recorded Biddeford is most of the way there with a Logitech C920–and I’m better than most of the people recording videos.

[AngryData]

Ive only ever had trouble with using phones as webcams. It seemed like a great idea, but ive probably wasted a good full 40 hours of my life trying to make them work right. And when I get it to work, 6 months go by and they force you to "update" to more broken features and then charge money for basic functionality. Whoops this software doesn't let you flip the camera the right way. This one doesn't like USB for some reason so lets try wireless, whoops it completely saturated the wireless connection with completely uncompressed video and drains my phone faster than it can charge. This one ghosts horribly if you move slightly too fast. Oh this one seems to be work... what the hell I dared put my hand to close or a light source came in view for a second and it completely bjorked the exposure levels and fails to readjust again leaving an either mostly black or mostly white picture.

Since I don't use it constantly, if I expect to be using a webcam I need to make sure I have atleast a couple hours the day before I need it to make sure it actually works when I turn it on again. And even then I still run in to troubles where certain programs see it and certain ones don't. Then I gotta push the video through multiple different programs to get the one program I need to see it right in the correct orientation. What I thought should be a super easy task turns into this huge ordeal and 25 new sketchy data stealing programs on my phone and computer. I even had a few which I can only assume were mining crypto currency with the amount of processing utilization they used even when the camera isn't on.

[na85]

>literally 0

Well it's at least 1 because I bought a "decent webcam" and while I own a smartphone I don't want to use that for long zoom meetings.

I bought one of those Instagram influencer light rings so I actually look normal on camera instead of like a corpse, and the camera lives on top of my USB C monitor.

[chrisweekly]

Replying to self (too late to edit), yeah I posted in haste; YMMV and clearly many people prefer a dedicated webcam per se.