Here’s the problem. We have two young kids at home, and we live in the city in a townhouse that’s not exactly large. And with that comes a lot of “shared space” – also known as partially controlled chaos. The room we colloquially called the “office” is not a dedicated work space. I couldn’t survive without the blur background function in Zoom and Teams. The closet is a storage space, and in addition to our standing desk, which is usually filled with laptops, monitors, laptop stands, and various peripherals that I test, we also have some non-work-related items around the room. Some of these things include a play kitchen, boxes containing toy food, a full box of Duplos, a modular play sofa, and a variety of other small items that are difficult to stand on.
Moving is not an option – at least not an easy one. Sure, I can close the curtains, but this is also where my 5-year-old displays his Lego creations. Doing so also leaves me exclusively with terrible track lighting on the ceiling – which, again, is behind me. It’s a very versatile room, and I’m sure some of you can relate to the limitations it creates.
I went back to buy a webcam. After all, an external webcam doesn’t have to cram all its parts into a tiny camera module that’s squeezed into the top bezel of the screen. It’s probably a mistake to expect too much from these small laptop cameras in the first place. I collected every possible webcam I could find. There are plenty of options available, from cheap 1080p cameras to spending hundreds of dollars on 4K options with AI features. But I was less concerned with specs like resolution, megapixels, aperture, and field of view, and found myself simply wanting to improve the dismal situation I faced in my office.
Lights, camera, action
Almost all 10 webcams I tried looked great during ideal lighting. I spent some time working in a different room by the window, and upgrading to an outdoor camera was important. With all that light to work with, the high-end cameras with a larger 1/1.3-inch image sensor handled the situations beautifully. I didn’t need direct natural light to get details in my face, exposing a wider dynamic range of shadows and highlights. Having more natural light in the room improved almost every webcam I tried, but it also better demonstrated how powerful some of these high-end cameras are, like the Insta360 Link 2C Pro or Obsbot Tiny 3. These are the scenarios most webcams are tested in, which makes them all seem more or less adequate.
