What I am surprised about is that nobody has made a high quality UVC camera with a large sensor and great lens, specifically for videoconferencing.
Even the "good" webcams (like the Elgato FaceCam and Logi Brio) have tiny sensors with small lenses. And iPhones (with Reincubate Camo) have bigger but still relatively tiny sensors.
Pair an APS-C sensor with a ~24mm f/2 lens, with no controls; just a USB connection. This would barely be bigger than the lens itself (think double the size of Apple's old iSight).
I'd easily pay $400 or more for this just to avoid messing around with mirrorless cameras and trying to mount them and use their drivers or HDMI capture USB interfaces.
An old phone is probably your best bet - you do not necessarily need that big of a sensor to get decent video. As long as you can provide enough light to keep the noise down and the lens (there are addon lenses for phones that are not half bad) is decent you can achieve probably what you want. The phone will have the necessary horsepower to actually process the video - I think that is probably the main issue vs a webcam
More importantly though why does most conferencing software limit us to such low resolutions? From what I remember Zoom is still max or 720P which is pretty damn terrible....
Yep -- I'm real surprised Logitech hasn't shipped such a thing. $2-400 is the sweet spot. At ~$600, one starts being able to use a Canon M50 and a 22mm f/2 for plug-and-play high-end webcam usage.
There's a huge market there that doesn't know it wants one yet, but it will once it becomes available.
Even the "good" webcams (like the Elgato FaceCam and Logi Brio) have tiny sensors with small lenses. And iPhones (with Reincubate Camo) have bigger but still relatively tiny sensors.
Pair an APS-C sensor with a ~24mm f/2 lens, with no controls; just a USB connection. This would barely be bigger than the lens itself (think double the size of Apple's old iSight).
I'd easily pay $400 or more for this just to avoid messing around with mirrorless cameras and trying to mount them and use their drivers or HDMI capture USB interfaces.