not only is the selfie camera on your phone absolutely incredible for its size
but it probably has been for about the last 10 years
which raises the question what the heck is going on with pc
laptops it feels like not only have they not really improved in any meaningful
way but in some cases they've even gotten worse
now my assumption here was that laptop makers figured
webcam that's an easy place to cut costs but as it turns out that is only a small
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
trying to get decent webcams into laptops we expect that you're just going
to use your phone quality look how much better this one looks so it's not even a
current gen phone the webcam falls considerably short of the surface laptop
after chatting with some engineers at hp i might also be partially responsible
for them being so bad but first to understand what makes a camera bad we
have to talk about what makes one good starting with
the sensor this sony fx6 features an enormous 35
millimeter wide full-frame sensor and when it comes to cameras
size matters all other things being equal the bigger the sensor the more
light it can collect on each pixel improving color fidelity and greatly
improving performance in low light conditions so problem number one is that due to
space constraints webcams use super
small sensors typically in the range of about two to five millimeters wide
that's the bit i'm concerned i may have influenced the thing is as pressure from
consumers and reviewers mounted for the bezels on laptops to shrink
so did the webcams shrink i mean we were stoked when dell announced refreshed xps
models with top mounted webcams that didn't look up the user's nose and i do
still think that was a worthwhile trade-off but the results are not incredible but does
shrinking the bezel really make that much of a difference
yes actually let me show you in the dragonfly max hp actually
increased the bezel size compared to the last model to accommodate a five
millimeter sensor quick correction here we said the sensor on the dragonfly was
five millimeters because well we were told was a fifth of an inch and a fifth
of an inch is five millimeters in actual fact it's 3.63 millimeters because
camera sensors don't use actual units instead use the
vidcon nominal size which is about one and a half times larger than the actual
dimensions of the sensor this is something that was decided by camera marketers in the 90s to try and sell
their super small sensor digital cameras still much bigger sensor than the dell
but not quite as big as we originally thought anyway back to the Linus now
that's still only two percent of the size of the fx6 i just showed you but
it's also a whopping five times the size of the 2.2 millimeter sensor in the
skinny bezel dells this bigger sensor also allows more
pixels to be packed in for 1440p recording which delivers a noticeable
improvement in sharpness compared to your typical 720p webcam another problem
for laptop webcams is Windows hello facial recognition something that i have
also championed loudly it is the best
way to sign into Windows hands down but because lighting conditions might be
dramatically different from one sign-in to the next it relies on built-in
emitters that will illuminate your face using infrared light
now digital cameras are inherently sensitive to infrared but most of them
actually block it out on purpose because it causes issues with both autofocus and
color saturation also it travels through some kinds of clothing which is a little
awkward that's why earlier implementations of Windows hello used a
separate camera dedicated to capturing ir
but then in that same mad rush to shrink bezels these have been combined in some
models and in spite of the software tuning that goes into these combined
sensors you can still get purple splotchiness and weird noise on the
dragonfly max then hp decided combined sensors were a pain in the butt they
didn't want to deal with so they included a separate ir and video camera
to get you the cleanest feed possible one thing they were really stoked about
is a special coating they developed so you couldn't see the ir hardware
apparently it was very difficult to do so um good job guys
now of course you can have the biggest baddest sensor in the world and if the
glass in front of it is bad your picture quality is going to be bad
one of the roles that the lens plays then is to ensure that that tiny sensor
gets as much light hitting it as possible
now the aperture of a camera or more accurately a lens describes how big of
an opening you have so the bigger the opening the more light you can get and
since we already have problems with low light on such small sensors well then we
should make the aperture on the lens for your webcam as wide open as possible
right well yes but also no the size of your
aperture not only changes how much light is let in but also the depth of field
lttstory.com by the way buy a shirt so
if we were to really open up the lens on the laptop it would need to have
exceptional autofocus to make sure that you don't go all blurry every time you
shift around in your seat now there are many ways to do autofocus
probably the best way is demonstrated in sony's alpha lineup like look at how it
instantly grabs focus on the keys in the shot from our tai can review it uses
parts of the sensor to detect the phase of the incoming light and uses that to
focus modern phones use similar tech probably
at least partly because sony also supplies the sensors for apple and
samsung with these super small microelectro-mechanical systems or mems
that can super accurately focus the lenses as for how laptop webcams focus
well they don't there simply isn't enough space
like think about the thickness of your phone i mean sure it's not
super chunker or anything but compared to the thickness of a laptop display
phones are enormous throw in that most laptop designers want
a smooth sexy curve at the edge of the display and then the cabling from the
webcam microphone and Wi-Fi antennas that are usually back there and you don't
have the space that you would need for multi-element lenses so just a single
focus point has to be picked and that's what you're stuck with so even for the
dragonfly max which is supposed to be our shining star today of a decent
webcam hp focused the lens at 50 centimeters which is the average
distance that someone sits from their computer during a video call and figures
well you'll get acceptable focus anywhere from 30 to 90 centimeters
all of this means that due largely to space constraints this is as good of an
image as you can expect to be getting out of a webcam on your laptop
but what if you didn't have size constraints here we've got the dell ultra sharp
webcam which not only uses a larger five millimeter-ish sensor but also has a
multi-element lens to improve the image quality with that said it does still lag
behind the rear camera of a phone because the third critical step in
squeezing the best possible image quality out of these tiny sensors is
post processing apple and google for instance use
techniques like sharpening and ai upscaling to enhance their performance
dell apparently has not sold enough extended warranties to match apple and
google's r d in this area but on the zoom call it is more than acceptable
of course you can get away with mediocre video just fine if your audio quality is
good now simple laptop microphones have
one or sometimes two little holes usually near the screen to capture your
voice while better ones can use more the dragonfly elite for example has two
super tiny holes in the lid that have mics behind them that sample the noise
in your room and then try to cancel it out now in the past noise cancellation
was only really good for removing constant noises like a loud air
conditioner not as good for short noises like a dog barking or
police sirens to combat this ai noise cancellation can
also be used which we demonstrated in this video about rtx voice it's kind of
amazing how good it is at removing random noises
and i'm going to be very impressed if rgx is able to get rid of it so then
the bad news today is that there are serious constraints to improving webcam
quality in laptops but the good news is that they can get
better and some laptop manufacturers are beginning to take the problem seriously
all it took was everyone working from home due to a global pandemic i will
have to be more careful what i ask for in the
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
look at sensel's force touch trackpad it is going to straight up change how we
use laptops in the coming years