Interim Skype Station Update
I have some plans for upgrading Skype Station this year — just waiting on some parts and time to work on it. I plan to split the current setup into two, much more specialized variants. For one of those specialized variants, I wanted to build it around a very intriguing camera setup; luckily I was able to test drive this camera and see where it falls in the line-up of gear I have on hand.
Quick Links
Specialized variants
Objectively speaking, Skype Station is pretty slick: it’s easy to use, fairly reliable, performant and delivers a great experience all around. Over time, I want to improve on what Skype Station can do — better image quality, easier to use etc. One thing Skype Station isn’t good at, is being portable.
We have a fairly nice backyard and I think my wife would like to work outside, amidst all the gross fresh air and nature. I prototyped some ideas for getting decent audio in the backyard — but I’m waiting on the cost of Raspberry Pi’s to come down in order to work on making it a bit more robust.
But what about video? I had previously performed some ad-hoc tests using a bridge camera (funny enough, it was the camera I originally built Skype Station around) but the ease of setup and use was a weak point. Using a mobile phone or a webcam addresses the ease of setup but now I have to deal with battery life and abysmal image quality.
Last year, Insta360 announced a very exciting webcam that threw a ton of buzzwords at us: 4K, gimbal, AI, etc. I was definitely interested — but I’ve also been ‘burned’ by Insta360 before…
Memory lane with Insta360
I own the Insta360 ONE camera which is neat. A single device that lets you take a spherical photo? That’s awesome (and totally handy for doing house-walkthroughs). My problem was with the software - or at least the Android experience. You couldn’t really do anything meaningful with the camera without physically tethering it it. Essentially, it turns your phone into a glorified Bluetooth shutter button for the otherwise fairly awesome gear.
Wirelessly tethering to the camera was a mess too - think olden days of wondering if the damn thing will pair or not.
So I wasn’t keen on being a guinea-pig for this camera. By sheer luck, a colleague of mine was excited enough to go for it and I let me try it out.
The contenders
I have a fairly decent camera line-up to test ranging from full-frame all the way down to the ubiquitous webcam of the 2000s.
The lineup of cameras for my test
For the tests to be meaningful and allow each camera to perform at its best:
Each camera is tested with the best available video settings including hand-tuned color-grading for each camera
The camera is mounted into the same teleprompter setup with minor positioning adjustments as needed to keep the framing as consistent as possible (to account for different focal lengths)
A mannequin head mounted on a tripod was used as a subject to ensure minimize/eliminate any influence subject-positioning might have
Where possible/feasible, I locked-off as many settings as possible (i.e., white-balance)
Lighting was controlled for the environment and consistent from camera to camera. For some of the cameras, I needed to move the lighting ever so slightly further away in order to keep the lights out of frame
The test environment
Note
One thing to note though: although I did tune each camera to try and give the best results, the ZV-E10 has a not-insignificant advantage since it’s dedicated to Skype Station and has had the most time spend fine-tuning.
Results
Sony A7 III
For full-frame cameras, I have both the A7iii and the A7R iv available; they are roughly equivalent in the headline feature: both will provide 4K with 8-bit color. I opted to actually test the A7 iii here because [a] the price point is lower, making it a more useful data point and [b] the A7 iii has an AA filter, which will give it a slight advantage on video. Will it matter? Likely not for scenarios like this.
Shot specifics:
The video stream is 4K
I used the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 at 22mm
Aperture was locked off at f/2.8
Shutter speed was locked off at 1/50s
White balance was locked off at 5500K
In practice, the A7Riv may have a usability advantage as it has realtime eye-autofocus in video but for the purposes of this test, the camera was pre-focused as best as reasonably available.
Sony A7 iii — I guess I could have moved that light ever so slightly more out of frame huh? ;)
Sony ZV-E10
This camera is an APS-C, vlogger-centric camera that I bought as an upgrade camera to the original Skype Station; as much as I would have wanted 10-bit, the cheapest Sony option at the time would have been the A7S iii which was prohibitively expensive to use as a webcam lol. Even now, the cheapest option would be the A7 iv which is still pushing the limits on what I would consider reasonable as a webcam.
I have this camera and lens permanently allocated for Skype Station - having a prime lens on here allows me to have an even lower aperture than achievable with my full-frame camera (with the lenses available to me at this time).
Shot specifics:
The video stream is 4K
I used the Sigma 30mm f/1.8. Other than having a faster aperture, one nice advantage of prime-lenses is reliability: I never have to worry about whether the lens has shifted focal length ever
Aperture was locked off at f/1.8
Shutter speed was locked off at 1/50s
White balance was locked off at 5500K
Even though this setup has a smaller sensor than the A7iii, I’m able to leverage the amazing Sigma prime to really drive the shot here. Since my full-frame glass is ‘only’ f2/.8, technically speaking, this setup has a lower aperture (f/2.1).
Sony ZV-E10 — this is the baseline camera & lens allocated for Skype Station
Sony RX10
This was the camera that started it all — the original camera I used for Skype Station. This is an old camera (2013!) but covers all the basics: constant f/2.8 aperture, a relatively large 1.0” sensor, eye-AF and even supports modern Sony hot-shoe accessories. After seeing the modern cameras, you can totally tell this is a substantial downgrade but if you take into account it’s age, this is stellar. This camera has a maximum video resolution of 1080, so keep that in mind.
Shot specifics:
The video stream is 1080
This camera has a built in lens with a constant aperture of f/2.8 I shot this at 18mm (about 48mm equivalent)
Aperture was locked off at f/2.8
Shutter speed was locked off at 1/50s
White balance was locked off at 5500K
Sony RX10 - the camera that started it all
Initially this image looks noisier than the previous but the specific choice of using ‘bricks’ as a backdrop helps a lot and lets some of the noise be ‘explained away’. If you remember that this camera is limited to 1080, this is actually very workable quality.
OnePlus 9 Pro
I got new phones a little while back so this was a good opportunity to see just how far smartphones have come. Using a plugin called DroidCam, we can feed a camera stream via the network into OBS. This is actually really cool because this is a super easy way to get into multi-cam streaming/recording. From what I can tell, the stream is limited to 1080 (coming into OBS) but the camera on the phone is capable of 4K so I suspect that through the process of super-sampling, noise is reduced substantially.
Shot specifics:
The video stream is supersampled 1080
The phone has multiple lenses, from what I can tell, this is shot using the primary lens which is 1/1.43”, 23mm (equivalent)
Aperture is f/1.8 (but with crop factor, this comes out to f/16.7)
There’s no option to lock off shutter speed
There is an option to lock off white-balance but there’s no numbers — just a scale that you drag, so I opted to leave this on ‘auto’
OnePlus 9 Pro - crazy what we can do with smartphones
So right off the bat, one huge takeaway here is that smartphones are awesome in terms the image quality they can put out - everything is crisp and sharp and there’s virtually no noise. This comes at the cost of
Limited adjustability. Maybe this is a OnePlus limitation, maybe it’s an app limitation etc.
Smartphone video tends to trend towards overdoing the sharpness filters though; in this specific context, I think it’s fine however, smartphones also overdo the saturation levels: this is the most saturated result by a huge margin
Battery life, heat etc.,
For short bursts, phones make an excellent supplemental camera if you can deal with the extra saturation. Specific to Skype Station, one thing to note is that a lot of phones have their cameras in the corners of the phone — which makes it tricky to physically place the phone behind a small teleprompter as it’s really easy to hit the sides of the teleprompter.
Logitech C920
What might be the original premium webcam, this was the webcam to get in the early 2010s and sadly, that’s about when Logitech’s drive to innovate and push out better products went out to lunch. They launched the Brio 4K a little while back but that feels like a case of too little, too late. Now that we’ve had a taste for what is possible, the C920 is categorically bad.
Shot specifics:
The video stream is 1080
Information on specifics of this webcam are exceedingly difficult to find
From what I can guess, this has a 1/3” sensor and uses a 28mm equivalent focal length
There’s almost nothing we can set, everything is ‘auto’
Logitech C920 - hard to think, this was the best we could do at one point
A decade ago, this webcam was hot stuff but I don’t think it has aged well. I think Logitech got comfortable with ‘well, it’s better than integrated webcam, what else are you going to do’ and when COVID and Elgato’s Camlink carved up a whole new market segment.
Logitech has released a couple minor follow-up webcams recently, but I can’t imagine they’ve substantially improved anything - certainly not for the ~$100 they are asking.
C920
C922: Adds a nearly pointless 60fps recording — only at 720P
C922X: (lol) Adds a 3-month license for Xplit
C922E: (lol) Microphone is disabled by default, also adds a privacy cover
C930: widens the field of view to 90° (up from 78°); whether this is useful is dependent on your specific setup
Insta360 Link 4K
And finally we get to the camera I set out to test, the Insta360 Link. While it’s not truly unique — there is a similar, slightly cheaper OBSBOT Tiny PTZ 4K but I would argue the Link is more compelling because of the [ever so slightly] bigger sensor and smaller footprint - the Insta360 Link is positively tiny, even when compared to the OBSBOT which is already quite small. Of course, what I’m here to investigate is the image quality.
Shot specifics:
With HDR, the stream is limited to 1080. Without HDR, the stream is 4K
This camera has a built in lens of 26mm (equivalent)
Aperture was locked off at f/1.8 (f/9.7 equivalent)
There’s no control for the shutter speed
White balance was locked off at 5500K
It’s a bit unfortunate that HDR comes at the cost of a resolution drop (you also lose high-framerate recording but that’s less of an issue in this application). If all I knew was the 1080-footage-with-HDR, I think I would be satisfied but now knowing how sharp it can be without HDR? In my opinion, you can claw back a bit of the colors with a bit of grading and looking at them back to back, the HDR-footage starts to look bad.
One small gotcha…
When run through OBS, the video feed introduces a noticeable amount of lag. Oddly enough, I noticed that there was substantially more lag if the video feed was configured as H264 rather than MJPEG — and here I thought encoding tech had gone past the days when this was even something to consider. Pardon the following grainy captures — there’s only so much I can do with animated gifs ;)
Configured as H264
The lag here is quite noticeable and will certainly be jarring for people viewing it.
Configured as MJPEG
There is still a bit of lag but it is substantially reduced.
The process of doing the stream capture and then converting to an animated gif does tend to exaggerate the motion a bit (which is helpful in this case when I’m trying to identify lag). In the real world, (where frames are not being decimated to create animations), there is virtually no lag when configured as MJPEG. A bit disappointing that this limitation cropped up given that I thought almost anything with more computational horsepower than a glass of water could handle H264 now. So for best results with the Insta360 Link, it appears we should:
Set HDR off
Use 4K resolution
Bring colors back with a quick grade
Configure the feed to use MJPEG
Conclusions?
The image quality from the Insta360 Link (non-HDR) looks great. Compared back to back with the ZV-E10, for sharpness, it definitely punches well above its weight. It’s only when you start to look for differences:
The lamp in the background is sharper (because the ZV-E10 has a much shallower depth of field)
Looking back and forth between the photos, you might notice bit of the mannequins face might have some noise (the sensor on the ZV-E10 is much bigger so there will be less noise)
Categorically, the ZV-E10 is better — but the fact that the Link passes the quick-glance test is incredible. The Link isn’t exactly cheap ($400) but it’s in a great position where anything cheaper is substantially worse and anything meaningfully better will cost a lot more. Worth noting is the possibility of using a smartphone as a portable-camera although this depends on your specific phone (as you start looking at older and older phones, the capabilities may fall off dramatically) and you’ll need to figure a way to handle the heat and drain on the battery.
I initially set out to see about finding a camera option for a more portable Skype station — and the Insta360 looks like the camera that fulfills that niche.
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