now looky here if i was to design a webcam for streaming
this would be pretty much exactly
spec for spec what i would do at least on paper at least we're gonna have to
see how the experience compares it's the elgato face cam uh this is a
very exciting product elgato makes very solid products people always complain they're a little
overpriced but really like their lights are comparable to more professional
lights with good color uh their mics pretty good their sound
panels again and when that was so overpriced but it's like when you
actually look at what they're doing they're accomplishing three different sound treatment things
and so i'm guessing it's the same with this it's a 200 webcam that's not too
expensive but that's kind of on the high end of webcams especially a 1080p webcam
but that's okay i prefer my webcam to be 1080p
anyway reason for that it's a tiny sensor so if you try and fit uh that 8
million pixel count which is what 4k is those
are tiny ass pixels and uh the bigger your pixel the
better it's probably gonna be especially for low light and when you stream you're
often in low light and so in my opinion for streaming 1080p is better it's going
on twitch it can only be 1080p anyway usually your little window so small anyway for video
conferencing 1080p is plenty uh and the compression's insane so uh
let's see what's in the box we got this box inside a box we got some
cables it's a long usb 8 to type c
i actually tried out this webcam yesterday it seemed to only work with
this cable i tried other usbc cables because i was having issues
would only register with this one so that's an interesting thing we're going to have to
play around with a little bit more so the last thing in the box
is instruction manual maybe i do need this because i was having trouble with
it yesterday it's nice it comes with well we'll get
to that a little instruction guides quick start it's pretty easy though plug it in
use the app you want to use it's not one of those cameras you can use in two apps
at once which is normal although that would be nice especially for streaming devices i want
cameras and capture cards that can be able to be read in two apps at once
that's a big selling feature for me the amount of times you need to record or
in a different app than you're streaming that's big that's big elgato you should
know you should know ava media provides it
all right now to the prime time baby
a little baggy to protect it um
here's the camera the it comes with the privacy cover i seem to have left it at
home uh it just goes on top it's uh plastic browned like a lens cap
but it's uh it's nice so you don't have to worry about it turning on and watching it without you
knowing especially with that uh big russian farm of hackers that just
display webcams and security cams on their websites 24 7 that you can just go watch
it's pretty scary as you can see it's actually a little bit bigger than you i
would expect most webcams to be it's got more depth and that's a good sign so this is the
anchor one fairly similar sex sex yep specs it does
1080p 60 as well it can also do lower resolutions uh
lower frame rates 1080p 30 might be better for you especially if it's a low
light situation but on twitch usually it's 60.
as you can see this camera is just deeper
than what a typical webcam looks like that's a good thing we're going to talk
a little bit about more why it's so deep later but in terms of
the rest of the body it's pretty standard it's got a monitor mount which is fine but it also has a quarter
20 screw which is really nice so you could actually put it into a tripod or
into a different many many many camera accessories so
depending on your situation this is actually awesome you could put a like a
quick release plate and snap it into a tripod this is that's a great thing i find it very
frustrating when you're trying to use a webcam in certain situations so
that's a big plus it's padded so you don't have to worry about scratching
your monitor which is very good so the big
selling features of this lens are that it's pared down some of the features
that are kind of unnecessary on a webcam so most
webcams have a little mic if you're using it primarily for video
conferencing that's nice to have especially if the computer you're using doesn't have a mic
but for a few reasons the mic on a webcam generally sucks
not only is it like a tiny little mic sometimes there's like a dual array
but it's so far away from the speaker that the sound quality is never gonna be
good and so what they've done to cut costs is just forego the mic and for streamers i
think that makes a lot of sense one of the first things you should buy as a streamer is
a decent mic because your audio is very important
it's a lot easier to connect with someone if their mics are good and so i
think that's a smart choice that's a smart compromise to make in terms of what's actually in here
it's the same sensor that's in the dell ultra sharp
webcam that we unboxed or alex unboxed a couple weeks ago
so it's a good sony sensor they advertise a bigger size
than it is at least the the dell one did and so it should be good in low light
sony's i mean at the top of the sensor game these days so that's great but what
i think is great is that it's a uh 24 millimeter
equivalent f 2.4 lens which is pretty ideal for streaming if i
was to buy a prime lens for a camera i would buy like a 24 or 28
lens and have it a bit further away from myself i've streamed with a 20
millimeter lens and it's it's been uh it's a little
bit wide it kind of distorts your face a bit so i think 24 equivalent is kind of the sweet spot so
i'm excited to see how this looks uh and how this performs
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the description below so i'm very excited to use this
thing i actually got rid of my my cine camera that i was using for streaming i've been
kind of looking for a cheap alternative for a while and so i'm excited to see if this can do
what i wanted to do it's got eight elements in the lens and each element has a double
layer of reflective coating so there shouldn't be issues with weird glare or
uh lens flaring which i think is really good especially in a studio environment
where there's bright lights in every weird direction we've had webcams where
there's just unusable lens flare and it kind of just sucks
and so let's see what it looks like my impressions right off the bat it's that
it's having a little bit of trouble with the white balance it's not i'm not
really giving it a fair shot just because it's facing a blue wall
so let's give it a bit more of a neutral background and see if that does
a little bit better it's still really contrasty it's really
red and that's actually what i noticed yesterday is that it the skin tones are kind of a little bit off
and over warm so let's see if i can change it a little bit so i think i'd
want like a slightly cooler tone so it's nice you can be able to do this there's the
elgato camera hub software where you can actually do more fine-tuning but
as of the time of the shooting this video it's not out so i'd be very
excited to see exactly what kind of fine controls because i think i could fix
the color issues a little bit more and make it look pretty good because the
overall look is very good it's very clear it looks like a webcam but
sharper and a little cleaner just kidding we have the software now through
a communication breakdown with he who shall not be fired
uh we have we have
found it we we got it i'm excited about that because this
could be i think what is the biggest selling feature of this camera is the
ability to uh control all the settings and get the
image exactly how you want it auto can be okay um but generally
it struggles especially if you want like something specific if you want your background to be very dark and you to be
kind of more poppy in the front it can struggle to be okay which
exposure am i going for and you want to be able to just set it
back no set for my skin and then the background is supposed to be black and so why don't we just go through the
settings and see how it is i've defaulted everything to the
automatic the first thing is just you got your input it's great
you can actually save your settings right to the camera so at the end of this i'm just going to hit the save
button and it's going to save right into this camera and then you can move it between devices and it'll keep
the settings that being said if you're moving it between devices you're probably changing it
like to different lighting setups anyway and so you'll probably want to have the
elgato software on there anyway it's useful though
the first one is the zoom which is very fun to play with
that's my mouth it's a digital zoom so i wouldn't recommend doing this
yeah i would generally just leave it so you're getting the full amount of the sensor and the full lens
it's gonna be the best image that being said that maybe there's a use case where you really need it zoomed in
that's fine you do you you do you in terms of picture there's the contrast
saturation and sharpness generally i think that webcams are a little too contrasty i kind of prefer
more flat look i think it's this is probably a little bit too flat zero percent so i'm gonna
go somewhere 20 i think that looks a little bit better it's not too oversaturated i mean like
that's over saturated oh yeah i like it
and then we got our sharpness oh yeah you can just see how blurry it gets it looks very almost like a dream
lens at the bottom end and then at the top end it's definitely
over sharp i think i prefer it a little softer
exposure i'm going to take it off automatic i so exposure is something
that i think is one of the more important settings about a camera but generally a camera
just kind of takes the whole picture and is like okay we want it to average out to this amount it takes like
the highs the lows and kind of just figures out something in between
that's not always great because maybe you do want a lot of bright or a lot of
dark and if if it's doing that it can just struggle to kind of find
what you want and generally what it'll do is it'll just change the shutter
speed uh and so if it's really bright it'll go to a more closed shutter angle
but then you'll it'll like be really like jittery and
and kind of gross it'll look like kind of saving private ryan the
the the beach scenes when it's like you can tell it's it's it's too clear
but then the opposite if that's too much light it's gonna have to open the shutter and then it's just really smeary
and crappy and i can actually just show you guys this if you go into high shutter speeds you
can see like the movements like kind of over clear and it just
looks really jittery it's not great it's not as bad as like a real if you're
doing this on a cine camera and then if you go the other way where it's really smear i mean it's
obviously overexposed as well but that's kind of generally as the shutter speed is how a webcam will
compensate for exposure that's not what you want you generally
want to have your shutter speed be your frame rate uh times two like
dividing one so it's like if you're shooting at 30 uh you want it to be 1 60
of a second is your shutter speed that's just it most closely approximate how
film was shot back in the day where the shutter was half half of the frame was
a close shutter and so that's generally the rule with cine cameras and it's nice
on this camera you're able to set it so we're shooting at 60 so we're going
to set our shutter speed at 125 which is the closest to 120
and that should look pretty good and it does i think that looks that looks good and then you can muck around with your
iso because it's pretty bright in here uh 164 is fine with 100
if it was a little dimmer you'd probably have to crank it a little bit and get it to be noisier you can see
the blues right there
it's noisy af dog you got your white balance you can turn it off
i think it's over compensating a little bit like it's going
too warm and i think there the camera is having a little bit of trouble with
white balance in terms of like my skin tone it's just like it's moving it all into something kind
of a little bit unpleasant it's not terrible it's not the worst webcam color
i've seen but i can i mean that's something that you pay for in really high end cine cameras is
really nice skin tone that just looks natural and it's very separate from all the
other colors in a frame this is like my skin tone looks very
similar to like like something in between that wood and
that like it's just it's all kind of a color so i'm gonna play around with
the white balance a little bit i think this is a bit of a bummer you can go from like cold to warm
temperatures which is great but there's no tint setting and that's when you buy
especially when you buy cheap lights usually it's like there's too much green
uh or sometimes there'll be too much magenta and that's actually i think
almost as necessary control as you're cool to warm
uh in terms of compensation so it's kind of a bummer that they offer this much
control but there's no tint but that being said uh having a white balance is nice
the last option is the noise reduction uh
it's not a particularly noisy camera i've seen way noisier i'm sure if we
used pretty much any built-in webcam it would be a lot noisier this is pretty clean
but you can turn it on generally this noise reduction doesn't look like it's a
super advanced uh advanced one in the sense that like
it just looks like a kind of a bit of a smear across the whole thing you can see my
skin i mean my pores getting old boys getting old people uh
it just like is softened a little bit same with the noise like the background this
the wall uh if you look at it this is with noise reduction on
there uh you can see it's like kind of
smeary and then i turn noise reduction off and it's like a little bit sharper so it's just it's one
of those noise reduction filters that just blurs everything a little bit it's fine
i probably would keep it off just because it's not that noisy anyway and i want a little bit of extra clarity
without the the digital sharpening and then you got an anti-flicker
although there's not really any issues in the back but it's nice a nice option to have and
so i can save it there it is that's pretty easy and honestly the
having this amount of control uh while maybe it's not as fully
featured as a cine camera it's good and it's a huge deal
especially if you want to learn how to manage a camera this is a 200 camera
that's pretty cheap compared to a mirrorless uh even a point-and-shoot is pretty
expensive and so for this it gives you a little bit of ability to try some
settings out it's not it's not going to be like your your your
end game camera but uh this this control is very
exciting for a webcam i was hoping for a little bit of a more
noticeable jump in clarity especially because they advertise that it's a
422 uncompressed video going to the computer whereas most cameras are
are compressing the video which adds processing time so there's theoretically
less lag and it's supposed to be higher quality video it's that's a huge deal
especially if you're a streamer using a green screen having the extra color information
allows it to be a cleaner key and so that's a huge deal if that's the
kind of streaming you want to do in terms of color it's hard this isn't the ideal webcam setup
i find generally flatter lighting is more giving a webcam a better shot
because you're kind of seeing the edge of the set as well as like a bunch of different
lights it's just probably going to struggle a little bit i think again i could probably fix it a
little bit if i had more manual controls but unfortunately today i cannot but this is
this is not a bad webcam like i said i took it home yesterday i was having
crazy connectivity issues and so your your mileage may vary we
aren't having those issues today but basically uh while i was streaming every
like 30 seconds every 20 seconds i mean i'll just give the editor a clip he can make
like a five second super cut of my frustration technical difficulties on
the first second again oh this one sucks
for tonight i chose the rhino
yeah there's not this room isn't that exciting i mean i'll show you guys the view the views the view is pretty cool
oh my god
no nothing it's not even showing up anymore
but this this isn't bad it's totally usable again webcams are in a weird spot
where they kind of have to cap out at 200 i
mean 200 isn't cheap it's expensive for a webcam but when you compare it to
a mirrorless or a cine camera or something else it's a
it's a it's cheap alternative but if you were to make this more expensive
you would have to just sell it as a camera i mean once you're into 500
range you're just buying a point and shoot at that point or you could buy like an a5000 like
uh or like that series of camera and really do a lot better
and so what i'm finding is yeah skin tone's a little bit off it's having a
little bit of trouble the autofocus seems to be pretty good although for f 2.4 i'm finding that the
bokeh is not particularly attractive the field of view is pretty good it's 82 degree field
of view which is pretty nice you could actually get in pretty close and the autofocus is
tracking me pretty good uh the optimized distance is 12 inches to 47 inches which is
pretty close to where you would be when you're streaming or like video conferencing but
let's compare it to what's built into this laptop this is what this camera looks like you
can see the has a lot of trouble with the highlights
it's a really struggling with my skin tone it's trying to bring up the blacks
too much and so it's just weird colors weird uh like my face is
just a yellow red blob it's not very attractive it's very
grainy it's not very clear would not recommend using this at all
so yeah overall this is a pretty good option
i mean in my head every time i look at a new fancy webcam
i hope that it's going to be like competitive with a much more expensive
camera and that's kind of an unrealistic expectation but this is
pretty good the question remains is it worth 200
of your hard earned dollars maybe i say that the razer keo pro is
probably a better option out of the box
however this one with the fine tuning you could kind of get it to a better
spot i think the uncompressed video if you're someone that wants to use a green screen
that's a huge deal that's a lot better like a lot
better trust me and so this is a pretty good option on
the market it's definitely worth checking out just like it's worth checking out our
other ShortCircuit videos there's a whole arrangement there's
beautiful videos for all of you i present you
a sandwich of videos thank you for watching why don't you like subscribe
comment if you want this or you don't
or what webcam you're currently using why not
bye