Good Evening!

For this video, i had to wait for complete darkness outside

as for this video, i need completely artificial lights

to adress the second topic of critic me

which was lights and camera.

I did find it interesting, that critic me admitted, my lights weren't really good

because who ever have seen this can't really claim

"Okay, that is doing allright. Your lights are great, everything is fine!"

No. My lights aren't great.

You see a seemingly slightly blurry image

This is caused by a glaring light source that seems bright

but actually isn't enough for this webcam.

Let me show you some thing.

Right...

What you see right now are default settings.

This is what the webcam makes out of what its "seeing".

Its complete automation - let me set the white ballance to automatic as well.

This is what the webcam does by itself.

It has - uh, still - a slight blurr to it

because the webcam simply cannot make anything better out of it.

On top of that - if you take a look at the ceiling - it now has a strong visible noise to it.

This noise is caused by not enough light being present in this room.

What the webcam does like this is to counteract the low light by adding artificial amplification to the light

This also causes especially the left of my face to be almost blown out by too much light.

It's even worse with the T-Shirt i am wearing.

It's - for the most part - completely lost in brightness.

So what can we do about it? Lets try changing the settings manually.

I started by disabling the automatic white balance, removing the "default" autocorrection.

I replaced it with a setting that i know to be roughly correct.

This is the result. Yea, i think that's about right.

The tone of my face's skin looks halfway healthy i guess.

The background has a greenish tint to it on screen, but honestly, thats exactly what my room looks like.

This should give you a good impression of what to actually expect of this allegedly warm-white light.

Cameras will show you. Cameras will alway expose the inconsistency between the companies claims and what you will actually get.

The issue is the human eye, which is easily deceived.

But - oh well, I digress.

I'm disabling the automatic exposure. I'm disabling the low light compensation.

All of these settings. I changed the exposure to a manual setting of -5.

I am lowering the gain.

And you might have noticed: The camera tried to focus.

I'm disabling the auto focus feature.

What you can see right now is - in my oppinion - the best you can get out of this camera.

Let it be just a tiny bit of gain left in the settings, if you really need to (the artificial amplification)

But for the love of god, don't overdo it or you will end up with an unusably noisy image.

So what you can see right now is simply the best I could get out of the cam like this - using manual settings.

You can't get it any better.

I could now start any try setting the gain even lower, from -5 to -6.

But this would cause two things: 1) It gets darker. 2) As you can see, it flickers.

And now get this: If i raise the gain even further, the flicker gets really nasty!

The flicker you can see is visible, even tho I did sett the power line frequency correctly.

And changing this to 60 hz doesn't do it any better. It changes the frequency of the flicker a little, but it's still there.

As you can see, there is no changing this. And this flicker has to be unbearable for you so let me change this real quick.

It was only for demonstration anyways.

Right...

So this is simply the best to be expected out of this webcam

With this light - like i said - this is the best, this webcam can do.

You can also notice a certain blur on the image, which is caused by too little light.

Well... Yea, you've seen what I did. I tried tinkering with the settings already. That is all. You can't do better.

These are idealized settings. There is no way, you can do it better.

And this - for example - is just one reason for me to decide: I am interested in the Logitech Brio.

Yes, I do and I admit it! And let it be its 160 Euros.

Actually, i'd have to admit: It is interesting to me, BECAUSE it costs it's 160 Euros.

It was 250 Euros when it first launched. And to this i got to say: Sorry, but No. Just no. I'm a cam nerd, but: No!!

And that's because i've seen YT Videos of guys who actually have a DSLR and proper light, who tested this Cam against a DSLR.

So we're talking Brio VS DSLR Monster. And they compared the lower tier models as well, like the C922 and C920.

What can I say? The lower tier models got completely annihilated.

At too much light, They did exactly what I have shown you before: Everything becomes too bright too fast, the highlights get blown out, the highlights get lest in brightness.

The Brio was able to cope much better. It also was sharper image.

It also had a better contrast. The only thing it could not do and there will never be a webcam than can do it

- at least as long as they are built the way they are now -

you cannot blurr out the background. For that it needs a lot more light incidence, a stronger lense, a bigger sensor.

And this simply is not possible with a webcam.

But apart from this - like i said before - for that money, especially, if you consider what you still need.

You need the DSLR, you need a lens, you need some sort of mount, you need cables.

You probably need some sort of dongle to run the DSLR on a power adapter at a power outlet to not kill the battery.

As it will never survive a stream. You need a capture card to output to a PC.

That is... complete overkill.

You can't... No... for the kind of money you spend on that, its not worth it for anybody, who just does a live stream for fun every now and then.

Even if he is a tech nerd as me.

Because of that, i got to admit, the Cam (Brio) is interesting to me. But then again, its not *that* important

because - again - I believe, because i've seen how sharp the image of my cam can get on a day,

that i simply need good light - that is the most important to me right now.

I need brighter light and you did see it yourself:

Let me show you again - just a sec.... Here.

My current setup as is. I got one spot clamped to the microphone arm, the other one is leaned to the back of my keyboard.

I told you the reason: It's broken and im to stingy to get a new one.

With really good lights, really good LED lights, that have an effective diffusor on them, i could do about the same than with a soft box

I'd get soft light to get rid of those lines all over my face. Those are a there and.... right?

The thing is, those aren't half as bad on daylight, as daylight is much softer.

And Like I said, i need brighter lights, to run the cam at a lower exposure time without having to add gain to the image.

I need soft lights, i need daylight white lights.

(i got confused here tried to correct myself tho there was nothing to be corrected actually)

I've given you a demo on the differences, at least indirectly, when you were able to see, that in parts the image was way too orange.

That is, if i used manual settings. The issue is: Right now, i had to tune down the white balance quite a lot, so it gives me a halfway natural light.

Of course, as long as all lights were artificial, their white color doesn't matter as much, as you can always readjust them.

The thing is: These lights cannot be readjusted. This is what you get. Some sort of warm-white-ish light.

Of course, i could get myself daylight white bulbs for them, but do you know how expensive those are? I could never justify them.

Especially not, knowing the live span of those things. They break pointlessly fast!

And those companies wanted to tell me, they live longer than regular light bulbs?

Another issue is: At daytime, i'm getting daylight coming through the window right next to me.

Over there it gets dark. Let me show you:

If i place my cam like this....

(fumbling with a light) yea, thats about right...

You get the following effect you'd also see at daytime. From one side, light hits me

- this one right here - That would be the light coming from the outside.

Without additional light, the effect i'd get would be something like this exaggerated example.