One day I will go on vacation and pack all the tech that I need.
But it is not this day. I was still in the Uber to the airport
when I realized that I didn't have the webcam
or high quality microphone that I needed for the WAN Show,
which means I've got two options. I could end a five year streak of weekly WAN shows
or I can venture out once again in search of an Asian tech model that has what I need.
Welcome to Yongsan Electronics Market, which according to Flip Korea is the largest in the country,
boasting about 5,000 stores across more than 20 buildings.
Now I won't be exploring all of them, at least I hope I won't need to,
but it seems like a pretty good chance I'm gonna end up in more than one because unlike some of my previous adventures,
I don't have a local guide or even anyone who speaks the language.
And if this recent conversation on Reddit, as well as TripAdvisor is anything to go by,
it seems like this place can be a bit of a challenge if you don't know exactly where you're going
and exactly what you're looking for. Things aren't looking much different on the second floor.
It feels kind of like a ghost town. There's not a ton of people here
considering that this is a weekday afternoon. What I would also love to see is any peripherals,
but what I do know is exactly the segue to our sponsor.
According to Wikipedia, soon in Plaza is the place to start
if you're looking for computers and computer accessories.
And right out of the gate, literally the gate. I think we're looking pretty good here,
which is kind of a relief because honestly getting here was a bit of a bear.
Anywhere about China, I'm accustomed to using Google Maps, but here because of a data sharing agreement
or rather lack of an agreement that the South Korean government has with Google,
we instead use Naver, which has some stuff that's really good about it.
Actually found the walking instructions to be freaking outstanding.
But it's not really super English optimized. And in fact, even just searching for this Plaza
and it didn't bring up any results. So I've had to look things up on Google
and then cross reference with Naver in order to find any specific building.
I was about to say, look, look, they have RAM,
but they actually don't, most of them are empty. One thing that doesn't seem to have hit
at least too hard here yet though is storage shortages.
Lots of hard drives at this shop, not to mention plenty of SSDs.
How's pricing though? I'm already noticing a pattern I've read about online
where a lot of things don't have pricing and you're just kind of expected to haggle.
Can I have a price? Eight terabyte. Eight terabyte?
Yeah. Yeah, the price buddy gave me for that was about 247 US dollars, which isn't ridiculous,
but it is about 40 USD more than if I just bought it from New Egg.
One nice thing if you're looking for a deal though is there seems to be just tons of secondhand stuff here.
Even the shops that seem to deal predominantly in brand new hardware will unashamedly put,
you know, older used CPUs on display.
As a scrap yard borer, I love to see it.
What I would also love to see is any peripherals.
What I'm really here for is a microphone, remember?
And a webcam. Oh, here we go. Well, let's have a look.
That's a microphone already. With that said, I don't want to buy the first thing
that I find, especially when there could be deals to be had. I was on my way to explore other options
and I came across this bin of Logitech G102
mice for seven US dollars each. If I could find a deal like that,
but for my webcam and my microphone, I'd be pretty stoked.
I do wonder if some of the deals are because this place has kind of fallen on hard times though.
A lot of the stuff piled up in here seems to be e-waste and there's not a ton of people here
considering that this is a weekday afternoon.
Things aren't looking much different on the second floor. On the one hand, there's all this inventory
and there's plenty of staff, but it just feels kind of like a ghost town.
To the stairs we go again.
Nope. Maybe better luck going up one more.
Okay. I think we ran out of stairs here.
Back on the second floor now then, where with my fresh perspective, things seem a little more alive.
Oh, is that? Is that an entire knock to a store?
Okay. Kind of cool. Not gonna lie, this place kind of hopping.
People trying out all the different mechanical keyboards.
Great. Made my way back to that first shop where I found the razor mic.
And the closed. I guess the adventure continues.
Wait, you gotta be kidding me. I came in on the second floor.
I haven't even seen the first floor yet and some of these shops look big.
Lots of inventory in this one. Mics and webcams though.
Hard to say. And in fact, I don't even know if I'm allowed in there.
I think it might just be a pickup location, which might explain the very limited foot traffic here.
Like that place looks cool. I think it's time to ask directions.
Apparently there's someone here who speaks English. At least enough that the rest of the staff
is bullying him into trying. Yeah, they sent me back upstairs.
I really don't know if that's gonna work out for me. Holy crap, how did I miss this before?
A Logitech store. This may be the answer.
Show me a desk microphone. Show me any webcams.
I don't see any. All they have is the most basic of webcams
and no desktop microphones.
According to my new bros at the Noctua store, I might be better off trying Electroland.
So my prediction came true.
We are done at this building and moving on to the next one.
All right, it might be time to adjust my objective here. I mean, even back home, I can't think of anywhere
that I would go to buy a bougie webcam. So how about this?
I plan to use my phone as my webcam. I just find some kind of phone tripod
and then as long as I can find a decent microphone,
then I'm GDG. Maybe some LED strip lights.
Why am I adding things? I just left the last building because I couldn't find anything on my list.
There it is. The f**k is that?
Anywho, here we are and okay, I could get a camcorder.
That would be a camera solution. Already, this is looking way more promising
in terms of what I'm likely to find for consumer electronics.
Here we go. This looks promising.
Not bad. It's a little over a couple of hundred US dollars for the mic, which is more than I wanna spend
for something that I'm gonna use once. So I'm gonna go ahead and get my camera.
It's something that I'm gonna use once, but is a high quality enough mic
that could just be part of my travel kit permanently. And then I'll never be in this situation again.
And there's a little vlogger kit that has a little stand that you can put your phone on
and then a little LED panel.
Didn't actually ask for the pricing on that one because I was like, well, hey, look,
if the second place I walk into here already has what I need, who knows what else I'll find?
Oh, dude, totally unrelated to my quest, but this is so cool.
Wait, it actually works.
Floor two looks like it can serve all of my portable CD player needs.
Whoa. I don't even wanna know how much this stuff costs.
Nevermind, I found out.
And that's just scratching the surface of the crazy hi-fi stuff in here.
Check out this place. Next door is another one.
Are enough people buying this stuff that we can sustain multiple of these shops
right next to each other? It, is that, is that an old CRT projector?
What? What is this place?
Even more of this stuff. Look at this damn turntable.
That's enough bougie audio stores for me. Let's see how things go on floor three, where, okay, we're back in,
build a PC out of parts land. Really close to finding a phone stand here.
That's only about seven American dollars.
Unfortunately, the build quality feels like seven American dollars and my iPhone doesn't fit with its D-brand case on it.
So I don't wanna have to take off every time I go to use my phone as a webcam.
All right, let's go up another floor, I guess. Where we find gaming land.
Also arcade and cinema.
And that seems to be about it. Other than this trippy aorist lounge,
whatever the heck this thing is. After the spooky hallway, we get to new building
where they've got this Lego themed cafe with a little build it yourself workshop next door
and a little racing ramp. That's pretty cool.
Just found another place that carries a road, but they don't have any other desktop mics.
And I just realized I'm back to the CD Walkmans.
I somehow ended up back in the old building, which means I've pretty much seen this place
and I only found the one spot that had a high quality desktop microphone
and the price, I looked it up after. Turns out, not great.
Let's see if he can do anything to help me with that. There is good news though.
On my way over, I found this selfie stick tripod combo unit for 27 US dollars.
Am I stoked to pay that much for it? No, but it seems sturdy enough
and I'm kinda running out of time here. So I think I'm gonna go for it.
Starting to run out of options. Found a place that had a little panel light.
They wanted about 50 US dollars for it. It looked like it was worth maybe 10.
However, there is a shop right over here that has the same road mic in stock,
so maybe I can get a price quote for that. How much is this one?
250. 250? Can you do a discount for this and this and this
all together? No. No, okay. Well, I didn't love negotiating with that guy,
but Stahl B106, gotta give him credit.
He gave me a far better price on the NTUSB Plus and while I paid a little bit more for this small rig light
and a matching stand than I would have liked, the overall bill was $223 US dollars,
which is honestly fine. Now I just need to stand for my phone.
I think I'm gonna go back and get the one I just saw. Add another 23 US dollars for this mama-jama
and it's time to have a look at the results. Let's start with what I would have had
or may very well still have because it just occurred to me, right,
I'm doing the Linux challenge right now. I actually don't know if I'm gonna be able to use my phone
as my webcam. Anyway, here's our camera.
Not too impressive. Also, I'm not getting any audio capture off of this thing.
Where the hell are my audio devices? These were working.
Or, wait, were they? Come to think of it, had I only used Bluetooth headphones on it?
Well, if the point was to show that this would have been a disaster,
I guess mission accomplished. Horrible camera and nonexistent audio.
All right, let's see the new setup. All right.
Well, this is progress.
Okay, all right. Checkity, check, check, checkaroo.
Nice. Okay, we've got audio now.
Okay, now we just gotta figure out how to get video from my iPhone to my Linux laptop.
All right, is this working now? I think so.
I've got monitoring, I've got video with actually surprisingly low latency.
I've got audio. I think I'm ready to go.
And I haven't even shown you guys the best part yet. Haven't even turned on the light yet.
Oh, oh lord, is that ever worse?
Okay, well, not everything about this was a huge success,
but this entire setup, assuming that I already had a pretty nice phone,
cost less than what I spent on the Razer webcam
that I did my last away from home stream on. So as far as throwing something together at the tech mall
goes, I am pretty freaking happy with this.
I'm sorry, but no amount of trying to make Steam
the same thing as the App Store and the Google Play Store is going to make it the same thing.
And I'm pretty freaking happy to tell you about our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this one, and you liked the whole Linus checks at a tech mall vibe,
you might like the time that we built a $12,000 custom gaming rig in a Taiwanese tech mall
that was freaking awesome. And then we gave it away at the end.