Beyond The Webcam

When it came to streaming, I did all my research on who did it the best—who had the best camera, the best quality stream, the best audio, etc etc.

I didn’t take a serious shot at streaming until about 2 years ago and the first webcam I picked up seemed to be the most sought after: The Logitech C920.

Right off the bat I felt like I had looked like everyone else, specifically in quality, color, lighting, etc. Some streamers like to add background colors or changing fill lights which adds for a cool duo-tone effect. Some use alert triggered or bot-driven chat commands to change the colors. Some, including myself, started using green screens regularly. But in the end, it’s tough to stand out and I just wasn’t happy with the end result.

I even went through a two camera setup (two webcams) using a C920 and C922x (which actually output 60fps but only at 720p) but every time I wanted to do a zoom-in effect, it just looked stretched out or grainy. Pushing to 1080p didn’t necessarily mean better quality either. To add insult to injury, Logitech’s webcam software and drivers are riddled with issues, including not saving settings, which means you’re resetting color balance and exposure every time you turn it on, or not being able to find both camera sources at times. All that hassle for a low res, inconsistent FPS which is a nightmare if you need those settings to stay for a green screen setup, for example.

The Logitech Brio seemed to be a good alternative, pumping out 1080p at 60fps or 4K at 30fps(?). I’ve never used one but at that price point (~$200USD) it seemed too little, too late when newer and better solutions were coming out at the same time.

Earlier this year, I finally hooked up my DSLR (Canon 6D + 50mm 1.4 lens) to the stream to get that nice and crispy bokeh (or shallow depth of field look) on stream. The colors could be adjusted with the Canon app and I could run it through a USB 2.0 port— which I later found out caused a bottleneck and only allowed ~30fps.

Fun fact: It’s actually tougher on full-frame bodies because it’s trying to push more pixels through, which ended up hurting the framerate more than helping.

Now I’d say about 95% of people are OK with this setup. I’m going to sound elitist when I say this wasn’t enough for me. I watched frames drop almost every stream, I had too many apps open (EOS utility for color and control settings + Sparkocam to feed it into OBS as a ‘webcam’ source and keep it awake for extended periods), and all this for it to read at ~30fps and NOT full HD resolution? Again, most people are fine with this, being that it ends up usually being cropped anyway and majority of streamers scale down to 720p unless they’re partnered. (I stream at 720p/60fps.)

I wanted a full 1080p or 720p source with 60fps consistently. The Canon 6D is a great camera but in this specific body, even the HDMI output wasn’t “clean.” (Clean— meaning no overlays, distortion, frame rate/resolution limitations, etc.)

It was a higher cost than a Logitech BRIO camera setup with all the features and quality I was looking for in a dedicated stream camera. In EposVox’s video above, he’s using a Samyang 12mm wide-angle lens. He also prefers the look of 1080p30, whereas I prefer 1080p60 (allowing me for zoom-in and scrolling flexibility when creating OBS memes.) 4K is a nice feature for this little guy but I don’t need all that (just yet) for a 720p stream.

Think of it as a GoPro setup with the flexibility of interchangeable lenses.

Here’s my setup that I use today:

Thanks for reading or at least skimming to this point. I hope you find some of this useful when deciding what camera you want to use for your stream.

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