Say yellow to yolo with the Yolo S7
camera. It is a very unique webcam in
the sense that it is a webcam designed for streaming and content creation that
has a removable lens. That's so exciting. What do we get in the box? We
get that sleeve so you can bring that camera around. We get quite a beefy type
A to type C which is our data cable and it's quite long. That looks to be about
10 ft. That's pretty nice. You could bring this camera as far as 10 ft from
your computer. That's incredible. Oh yeah, that's a little facicious. It is
meant to be a webcam. So 10 ft is actually plenty long. In this box, we
have a C to C power cable. Looks to be about the same beiness and length, maybe
a little bit shorter. Uh but both of these connectors actually have a little
screwing bit so that it locks so that even when you move the camera, you're not in super large danger of just
yinking out a cable in the middle of a live stream. Uh which would be catastrophic. We have our quick start
guide and our product manual. And that's it. YOLO also sent us a power adapter.
Um although you could presumably use a different USB PD one. What am I looking
at? Oh,
that's a really long brick. If it's on a
surge protector that's on the ground, not a big deal. But if you're plugging it into a wall, that is a lot of weight
on something that uh has very little resistance. This little doohickey is
good for up to 45 watts at 20 volts, but that wouldn't be necessary. The camera
itself uses 12 watts of power. Uh, and so this should be plenty. But you also
have a lot of versatility in the kind of power bricks you could be using. Inside
this one, we have oh, nice. A little L bracket uh, with quarter20 slots as well
as a slot that we could put another quarter20 to mount our camera in its
vertical orientation. This is predominantly for short form content
creation presumably, although that makes
less sense to me than it being a streaming camera. I have a lot of
questions about this thing that I hope I will be able to answer. Last thing
inside this box is our 1/420 tripod little screw. The L bracket itself is
actually a pretty good quality. This is pretty on par with something I would
expect from like a small rig or something. And the fact that you have
the three mounting holes on the back is actually a pretty nice quality of life thing. Uh thankfully we got some pretty
good versatility. We have a microphone jack, we have an HDMI out, and then we
have two type-C's. One is for power and one is for data. And that's because you
can actually stream using the HDMI out and the type-C. The type-C will be
limited to 1080p, but if you're Twitch streaming, that's more than enough,
especially when you go non- full screen. So, I don't think that's a huge huge
factor. And if I was using this at home, I actually probably would do that to avoid having another uh HDMI box or card
in order to read that. On the top, we have our cold shoe mount so that you
could put accessories. Presumably, you could put your mic that you'd plug into
the back. sides very plain bottom quarter 20. On the front we have our
sensors and laser for the time of flight autofocus which is a pretty cool feature
for a camera like this. It uses basically a laser and the time it takes
for that laser to come back to the camera in order to measure the depth
which would allow for really fast autofocus. YOLO claims 008 seconds of
autofocus. Although uh my guess is that measurement isn't including the whole
process of it and it also will depend on the lens. Yes. Because when you're using
a camera with good autofocus, having the right lenses on that camera can make a
huge difference. In fact, YOLO recommends just two lenses. They're 25
and 15 mil lenses, which should give you a lot of the room without having too
much fisheying on the lenses, especially as it is a micro four/ thirds camera, so
there's a crop factor. So, the 25 is about a 50 mm, which is good for
portraits. Uh, and that would be great for a facecam. Um, but actually would
kind of get a little tight when you really think about it. I'm thinking about it just like I'm thinking about
how time offlight autofocus has the advantage of being really fast and
really accurate. Uh but it also has a limit in the distance it can measure.
That's not a big deal for a camera like this that's not really designed to get big wide shots or moving subjects that
are really really far away. And so I think that's a pretty reasonable compromise and a smart design choice for
its use case which is have a damn good looking webcam baby. And sensor size is
a huge factor when it comes to having good image. Not only does it mean that
each pixel will be larger, which allows for more light and better lowlight
performance, it also gives you access to a whole suite of lenses that are
designed to have a more cinematic look with depth of field, as well as just
like versatility and how you can use it. And so, I actually think this is a
really, really cool use case for people that are predominantly tied to a computer and streaming all the time. One
thing you'll notice that I haven't talked about is a screen. uh as opposed
to most more versatile cameras, this doesn't have a screen cuz it's expecting
you to be tied to a computer, which uh
is predominantly a cono. That seems like a really impractical way
of doing it. Like, why not have this be self- sustaining? Although, the
trade-off could be the money they save on that computing internally uh could be
put towards making a better image quality for the price, but that remains
to be seen. Just like it remains to be seen if this thing actually can stream
forever like YOLO claims. They say because of the design and all aluminum
body, it'll dissipate heat fast enough that you could presumably stream
indefinitely, which is fantastic. I haven't had too much issues streaming
from mirrorless or DSLR in terms of overheating. But I have had overheating
issues mostly when I'm doing internal recording on Sony cameras a few
generations ago. Um, and it's very very frustrating when you're in the middle of
an interview and you're like, "Can you uh wait 20 minutes while I uh just wait
here for my equipment to cool off." Thankfully, that won't be a problem with
this. You just press the button, take the lens cap off. Look at that giant
freaking sensor. Okay, it's not giant compared to like full-frame cameras, but
compared to webcams, bro, this thing's like four times bigger. It's crazy. This
sensor is a Sony IMX sensor. There's not a ton of technical details. What we do
know is that it's good for 4K 60 across the whole sensor and has dual native
ISO. Um, although we don't know specifically which ISOs they're talking
about, but can range from 100 ISO to 9600 ISO. So, that's a pretty dang good
range. Although, I'm curious to see how grainy it gets at 9600. You know what
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[screaming] We've got our YOLO S7 set up on a seastand. That's probably not what
you're going to want to do. You're going to want to get some kind of mount for behind your monitor or to an arm.
Thankfully, the quarter20 means that it's going to be fairly easy. The other thing to note is that as a safety
feature, the sensor is not supposed to activate without a lens. And that's a good thing because if you have your lens
off and the sensor on, the electrostatic can actually draw dust to it and damage
the sensor. So, that's a nice little nifty little safety feature. You know
what I'm saying? I do have to say this looks pretty good. Uh, it has the
benefit of that proper not quite cine lens. Um, so you get that cool depth of
field effect like you can see Glenn in the back is out of focus. Um, it's doing
a pretty good job tracking me. This isn't the recommended lens. Um, but in
terms of if I was streaming, that's really not bad. So, let's see what we
got for controls. And I will say that even though the camera is really shaking
on the tripod, you can see in this camera, the actual video feed is not too
bad. Like it's obviously a little bit jittery, but that's not that bad.
There's got to be some kind of stabilization. Or maybe I'm just losing my mind. In our camera adjustment
panels, we got our video settings. We can go from landscape to portrait. If I
was using this at home, I would be using it in landscape. Gosh, wow. I can say if
I'm only comparing to webcams, this is the best looking webcam I've ever seen.
if we're comparing two cameras that are the same price as it, that remains to be
seen. And then we have our HDMI resolution. We're actually limited to
1080p through the USBC. That's plenty for our purposes today. Uh but it's nice
to know that you could do 4K through the camera, especially if you're making
YouTube videos. Uh for streaming, I don't think that 4K is as important.
Next, we have our imaging settings. That's a really subtle change in our
white balance. I prefer the cool colors, although I think they got their naming
schemes backward cuz this cool colors actually adjust tending warmer to adjust
for colder lights. Uh, so I think I look better at that. You can adjust your
sharpness uh to really cook those pores.
Uh, or really soft, which almost looks a
little bit out of focus, but not too bad. We have contrast. We can cook it or
uncook it. We can adjust our saturation. It's I can say [music] something sad.
People ask how you're doing and you have to say you're fine, but you're not
really fine. Deep down inside, you're hurting. Wow. That felt really real. We
have our distortion correction, which will adjust for fisheye. Uh although we
don't need that cuz we're using a 25 mm lens. Uh so you can see I'm actually
fairly far away like is now me a
centimeter away from touching. This works if you can get the camera behind the monitor. It's a little bit close for
what I'd be doing in our purposes today. Uh then we got vignetting correction,
which is not as much of a problem I found on microf. It's usually when
you're using zoom lenses on bigger sensors, but it's possible that there's
lenses that would uh vignette. So, it'll just basically adjust the edges of the
frame to not get darker. Next up, we have our focus. So, first we can adjust
our channel, uh, which should reduce the signal interference between cameras. I
don't do a ton of multi-cam auto focus stuff, so I've never experienced that
before, but you can change it so there won't be any interference. Then you have
your continuous autofocus, your single autofocus, or your face. So face seems
to have some kind of just like face tracking. I imagine for most people
they'll want that. And we can change the focus speed because although technically
you want the fastest tracking, sometimes it looks unnatural to have like a robot
autofocus when it's too fast. And there's something like a cinematic
quality that people actually enjoy more when there's a little bit of a slow
rack. And so I'm actually going to go standard on my focus speed. Next we got
our zoom. I wonder what that does. No,
we have our hot keys. So, we can set different levels of zoom to different keys. Um, but seeing as that we're
already at the maximum zoom, I'd want to be uh we are not going to need that.
Next, we have our AI parameter.
Why are they calling this an AI feature? This is just controlling a basic feature
of the camera. That's stupid. Don't call it AI, man. It's just controlling your
aperture. We can set the amount of AI blurring they do. uh as well as like the
aperture settings in that menu. So, it wants me to say still. Select your
preferred image brightness. This one's a little bit different.
Why did it do this weird color thing? This looks terrible. It looks so much
worse than it did before. Your AI gets a big thumbs down on top of the regular AI
thumbs down from me. We are going to reset.
So much better. [laughter] Also, I want to have manual control over
all my stuff. you might want to go to the audio and it's actually seems like it's done a pretty good job getting my
skin tones about where I would want them, but I much prefer having my
controls all manual. They have two different settings here that do the same
thing but with a different name. So, if you don't know, the wider you have your
aperture in a lens, the more blurred things are going to look when they're
out of focus. If you have a small little aperture, there's more depth of your
scene that will be out of focus. If you close your aperture by going to the
higher numbers, you will not only get a darker image because less light is going
through the smaller hole, but more of your scene will be in focus. Seeing as
we're having a good time at f1.8, that's great. Or you can use their drop down
for blur, low, medium, high, which uh
basically closes your aperture and makes things dark. I feel like that's fine,
but that should be in the auto side of the settings, not the manual side. Uh so
we're just going to leave that there. Uh next, we have our ISO settings. I
imagine that it's 400 or 800. So, we'll we'll go to 400. Either of them looks
pretty good. Like, not particularly grainy. Uh the image quality, it looks
like I've got a pretty good dynamic range, so I think 400 is plenty. Next, we have our shutter speed. And I
actually think that they're not right about this shutter speed because this is
60 FPS. And generally, when you're doing camera stuff, you have your shutter
speed at one over twice your frame rate, so that the shutter is open half of the
frame. That's the most cinematic look. But it wouldn't look quite right if
you're shooting 1/60th with a 60fps
frame rate. It would look a little bit soft and I don't think that's quite right. So I actually think they're lying
to me. But this does have sort of have that 30 FPS look even though it's
presumably actually at 60 FPS. So that's fine. And if I'm doing Twitch streaming,
I'm going to be at 60 FPS anyway. Next, we have our white balance, which is
great. The the auto stuff did a pretty darn good job. We got our our Greenland
look and we have our Mexico look. And then we have a blue and red offset or we
can pick a specific color. I actually thought the auto white balance did a pretty good job. So, I'm just going to
leave it that on auto. Although, if I was setting up for a long-term stream, I
probably would find the right setting so that I don't have to worry about it mid-stream kind of shifting. Uh, if I
have weird color things that happen, we actually have access to more color
correcting. So, you can take a capture image and then color correct that and kind of set that as a preset. We don't
need to do that. This looks good as it is. And then a live scene button, it put
everything back on auto, which actually is a good uh thing for me to point out.
In the exposure setting on auto, you can actually have an anti- flicker setting.
So for 50 or 60 Hz [music] depending where you are in the world, and then you
can kind of have a lot of the same settings. Like you can set your aperture here. Uh but then you can also set sort
of your amount of expected light to compensate for. Again, I'm going to just
go back to manual. That looks really good. And like, not only does it not
have a face light to help light my face, it's actually working against all this
purple bounce, and I have to say it's doing a pretty admirable job at making
my skin not look totally wacky. Like, when I'm looking at it, it looks a
little bit off, but if I was streaming with this, I don't think anyone would comment. It would look totally
acceptable, super sharp. The autofocus
is pretty good. It really wants to do my hand. You can kind of see it in jumps.
You can see when I do this, it goes like
D. But I got to say that autofocus is
working pretty good at tracking me. It takes a little bit to make sure that
it's got me. But usually when you're streaming, you're not running around your room too much. And if you are, I
would just crank the brightness in your room and then close your aperture a
little bit and you're probably going to be covered anyway. I'm not going to record the camera directly into OBS so
that we can get a better idea of what it'll look like in your recording
software. There is a little bit more jitteriness on my monitor. I had to
close the app in order to get the feed cuz [music] like most video uh devices
can only be outputting to one of them at a time which is really an annoying
distinction. I don't know if that's a Windows or OBS thing but freaking figure it out. Uh but you can imagine if I'm
just a tiny little person in the window
that's about as nice as I've seen for a streaming camera. Uh and people use much
more expensive cameras than this for streaming. But here's the flip side.
This thing is only [music] a webcam. And that could be great. You might be
someone that's like, "I just want the best video quality when I'm streaming on
my computer. I don't want to worry about it. I'm never taking my camera away."
But at the price of $800, which is its
sale price, but it's one of those sales that goes on forever. So, that's really
just the real price. They just want to pretend like you're saving 100 bucks, you can get a you can get a pretty damn
good camera. The Sony has a ZV10. The Mark 1, if you buy used, you can get
like 400, 500 bucks, 800 bucks new. The
Mark II is even better for video, but it's a little bit more. If you don't
like Sony, Canon has the R50, Nikon has the Z30 that are kind of similar price
brackets uh and I think are much more versatile.
However, I don't think that their video out is
substantially nicer than this. And so, if you are going to just use that as a
webcam, this isn't a bad alternative. And it is really good. It was really
easy. If you're someone that knows nothing about cameras, the auto settings
did a pretty good job. Not the AI settings, those suck. But $800 without a
lens is a lot of money for a webcam. [music] And if you're starting out in
content creation, here's a little bit of a tip. Video quality matters up to a
certain point. And when you kind of get past that point, there's a huge drop off
of diminishing returns. For way less than half the price of this thing,
especially if you're adding a lens, you can get a pretty damn good webcam that
captures you. And that's what matters when you're streaming is you, not the
camera, not the gear. Are you fun? Are you engaging? Are you confident? Are you
exciting? That's so much more important. So, if I were you, instead of spending
800 bucks on this, if you're getting started out, I'd buy like something pretty good at 200 bucks and then treat
yourself to like a massage for 600 bucks and just like enjoy yourself, come back
to your stream super recharged, super energized, and like that's a way better
stream. IMO just like this outro is better than the one I did yesterday cuz
I didn't do one yesterday. This is the first ShortCircuit I've done this week. And if you're still interested in a
camera in this price range for streaming, uh we actually unboxed the
ZV10 when that came out a couple years ago and so you should watch that one. I
have a lot of thoughts back then and I don't think they've changed that much
since