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not only is the selfie camera on your phone absolutely incredible for its size

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but it probably has been for about the last 10 years

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which raises the question what the heck is going on with pc

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laptops it feels like not only have they not really improved in any meaningful

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way but in some cases they've even gotten worse

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now my assumption here was that laptop makers figured

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webcam that's an easy place to cut costs but as it turns out that is only a small

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piece of the puzzle just like our sponsor storyblocks is a

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now i got a cop to this although i've been one of the most vocal reviewers

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trying to get decent webcams into laptops we expect that you're just going

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to use your phone quality look how much better this one looks so it's not even a

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current gen phone the webcam falls considerably short of the surface laptop

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after chatting with some engineers at hp i might also be partially responsible

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for them being so bad but first to understand what makes a camera bad we

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have to talk about what makes one good starting with

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the sensor this sony fx6 features an enormous 35

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millimeter wide full-frame sensor and when it comes to cameras

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size matters all other things being equal the bigger the sensor the more

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light it can collect on each pixel improving color fidelity and greatly

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improving performance in low light conditions so problem number one is that due to

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space constraints webcams use super

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small sensors typically in the range of about two to five millimeters wide

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that's the bit i'm concerned i may have influenced the thing is as pressure from

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consumers and reviewers mounted for the bezels on laptops to shrink

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so did the webcams shrink i mean we were stoked when dell announced refreshed xps

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models with top mounted webcams that didn't look up the user's nose and i do

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still think that was a worthwhile trade-off but the results are not incredible but does

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shrinking the bezel really make that much of a difference

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yes actually let me show you in the dragonfly max hp actually

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increased the bezel size compared to the last model to accommodate a five

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millimeter sensor quick correction here we said the sensor on the dragonfly was

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five millimeters because well we were told was a fifth of an inch and a fifth

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of an inch is five millimeters in actual fact it's 3.63 millimeters because

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camera sensors don't use actual units instead use the

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vidcon nominal size which is about one and a half times larger than the actual

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dimensions of the sensor this is something that was decided by camera marketers in the 90s to try and sell

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their super small sensor digital cameras still much bigger sensor than the dell

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but not quite as big as we originally thought anyway back to the Linus now

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that's still only two percent of the size of the fx6 i just showed you but

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it's also a whopping five times the size of the 2.2 millimeter sensor in the

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skinny bezel dells this bigger sensor also allows more

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pixels to be packed in for 1440p recording which delivers a noticeable

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improvement in sharpness compared to your typical 720p webcam another problem

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for laptop webcams is Windows hello facial recognition something that i have

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also championed loudly it is the best

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way to sign into Windows hands down but because lighting conditions might be

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dramatically different from one sign-in to the next it relies on built-in

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emitters that will illuminate your face using infrared light

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now digital cameras are inherently sensitive to infrared but most of them

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actually block it out on purpose because it causes issues with both autofocus and

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color saturation also it travels through some kinds of clothing which is a little

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awkward that's why earlier implementations of Windows hello used a

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separate camera dedicated to capturing ir

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but then in that same mad rush to shrink bezels these have been combined in some

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models and in spite of the software tuning that goes into these combined

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sensors you can still get purple splotchiness and weird noise on the

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dragonfly max then hp decided combined sensors were a pain in the butt they

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didn't want to deal with so they included a separate ir and video camera

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to get you the cleanest feed possible one thing they were really stoked about

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is a special coating they developed so you couldn't see the ir hardware

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apparently it was very difficult to do so um good job guys

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now of course you can have the biggest baddest sensor in the world and if the

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glass in front of it is bad your picture quality is going to be bad

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one of the roles that the lens plays then is to ensure that that tiny sensor

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gets as much light hitting it as possible

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now the aperture of a camera or more accurately a lens describes how big of

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an opening you have so the bigger the opening the more light you can get and

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since we already have problems with low light on such small sensors well then we

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should make the aperture on the lens for your webcam as wide open as possible

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right well yes but also no the size of your

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aperture not only changes how much light is let in but also the depth of field

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lttstory.com by the way buy a shirt so

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if we were to really open up the lens on the laptop it would need to have

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exceptional autofocus to make sure that you don't go all blurry every time you

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shift around in your seat now there are many ways to do autofocus

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probably the best way is demonstrated in sony's alpha lineup like look at how it

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instantly grabs focus on the keys in the shot from our tai can review it uses

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parts of the sensor to detect the phase of the incoming light and uses that to

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focus modern phones use similar tech probably

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at least partly because sony also supplies the sensors for apple and

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samsung with these super small microelectro-mechanical systems or mems

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that can super accurately focus the lenses as for how laptop webcams focus

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well they don't there simply isn't enough space

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like think about the thickness of your phone i mean sure it's not

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super chunker or anything but compared to the thickness of a laptop display

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phones are enormous throw in that most laptop designers want

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a smooth sexy curve at the edge of the display and then the cabling from the

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webcam microphone and Wi-Fi antennas that are usually back there and you don't

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have the space that you would need for multi-element lenses so just a single

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focus point has to be picked and that's what you're stuck with so even for the

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dragonfly max which is supposed to be our shining star today of a decent

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webcam hp focused the lens at 50 centimeters which is the average

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distance that someone sits from their computer during a video call and figures

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well you'll get acceptable focus anywhere from 30 to 90 centimeters

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all of this means that due largely to space constraints this is as good of an

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image as you can expect to be getting out of a webcam on your laptop

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but what if you didn't have size constraints here we've got the dell ultra sharp

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webcam which not only uses a larger five millimeter-ish sensor but also has a

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multi-element lens to improve the image quality with that said it does still lag

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behind the rear camera of a phone because the third critical step in

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squeezing the best possible image quality out of these tiny sensors is

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post processing apple and google for instance use

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techniques like sharpening and ai upscaling to enhance their performance

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dell apparently has not sold enough extended warranties to match apple and

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google's r d in this area but on the zoom call it is more than acceptable

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of course you can get away with mediocre video just fine if your audio quality is

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good now simple laptop microphones have

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one or sometimes two little holes usually near the screen to capture your

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voice while better ones can use more the dragonfly elite for example has two

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super tiny holes in the lid that have mics behind them that sample the noise

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in your room and then try to cancel it out now in the past noise cancellation

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was only really good for removing constant noises like a loud air

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conditioner not as good for short noises like a dog barking or

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police sirens to combat this ai noise cancellation can

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also be used which we demonstrated in this video about rtx voice it's kind of

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amazing how good it is at removing random noises

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and i'm going to be very impressed if rgx is able to get rid of it so then

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the bad news today is that there are serious constraints to improving webcam

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quality in laptops but the good news is that they can get

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better and some laptop manufacturers are beginning to take the problem seriously

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all it took was everyone working from home due to a global pandemic i will

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have to be more careful what i ask for in the

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future that is some real monkey paw stuff right there thanks to storyblocks

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Linus tech tips if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe check out our first

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look at sensel's force touch trackpad it is going to straight up change how we

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use laptops in the coming years