SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Topic: Choosing the right webcam by focusing on the features that actually matter—not marketing hype.
Key Points
• 1080p is sufficient for Zoom, YouTube, podcasts, and most online meetings.
• Good lighting has a much bigger impact on video quality than an expensive webcam.
• A smartphone camera is usually better but less convenient than a dedicated webcam.
• 30 fps is adequate for nearly all talking-head videos.
• Autofocus, face tracking, and ultra-wide lenses are unnecessary for most users.
• Use an external microphone—audio quality is more important than video quality.
• Check mounting options, USB connection type, and cable length before buying.
Bottom Line: Spend your money on good lighting and a quality microphone before spending extra on premium webcam features.

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Episode 1146 - Webcams
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1146 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about webcams. I'm not going to tell you which ones to buy, but I'm going to give you a whole bunch of things to think about. Kind of a checklist of getting one that serves you well, makes you look as good as possible, and all the kind of things you may not have thought of that webcams will do. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 1145. That was a gadget called a stylus that, oh my God, if you got fat fingers or you got long fingernails, it can precisely do stuff on your cell phones and tablets for you. Just really handy little gadget, cheap or free, you know, from 3 to 15 bucks. You got everything you need. All right, let's see. Pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Version 3.0 is the latest, but I'm about 90% done with 4.0 working on the graphics now and then I'll have Larry and Mark proofread it, and we'll be ready to roll with it. Don't feel bad if you don't or don't feel like you got to wait, because you can download 3.0 right now, and then this 4.0 is going to add to it. So don't hold back if you haven't gotten 3.0, just go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school and IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.
[00:01:55] All right, let's talk about web cams and don't don't get sucked. The first thing I got to tell you is don't get sucked into the hype. Oh, we do eight K and all this stuff. I'm going to go through a bunch of stuff so you don't have to spend a lot of money to have a good quality webcam, and don't think that the webcam by itself is going to make you look like a TV anchor. No, actually the lighting you can have the cheapo webcam and good lighting, and you'll look better than an expensive webcam with terrible lighting. So I probably have episodes on lighting, but basically you want to light the ring. Lights aren't so great, especially if you have glasses, you know, two cheap lights, one to your left and one to your right are probably all you need. If you want to really get fancy, you get a backlight. But I talk about that in other episodes. All right. But anyway, let's see. And actually, your phone is better than any of the webcams you're going to get. However, it's just not convenient to put your phone up and take it out of service. And you can't look at texts coming in. And I mean, it's just you're better off with a decent webcam that's set up and you don't have to fool with it all the time. Let's see. So the first question you got to ask yourself is, what am I using this webcam for? Do I do Zoom meetings or podcast interviews or podcasts and live streaming or customer service? What do you use the thing for? And you're going to get when you look at webcams, you just go to Amazon.
[00:03:43] You can see all kinds of webcams. They're going to have resolution. This is one of the things on your checklist. And some of them will say, oh, two K or 4K. Well, for most of the things I just rattled off of your uses, it YouTube especially, they compress your fancy schmancy video high resolution down to 1080p anyway, so you don't really need anything more than ten ADP. Most of the time, unless you're just, you know, super doing high quality stuff and using the heck out of it and trying to do professional promotions and all, you know, really, really, really into it because in most cases, you're overkilling it and it's just you spend a lot of money for nothing. Another thing you're going to see is frame rates. So you're the general, you're going to see 60 fps, that's frames per second or 30 fps. And you see oh 60 is is sounds better. Well, yeah. I mean, it'll do more things that you probably are not doing. So if you were doing really fast motion, I mean, it's great if you're out, you know, shooting, uh, 60 frames per second or more for your kid's soccer game. All right. But if you're sitting there just talking, all you're doing is making a higher file size and harder on your internet connection for no reason.
[00:05:24] So for most of your work, 30 frames per second is just fine. I can't remember shooting anything in the thousands of hours of videos. I've done more than 30 frames per second. Okay. Another feature is autofocus. Well again, what are you using this for? Do you hold up things to the camera frequently? Do you do whiteboard. Do you do demonstrations? Well, if you're doing any of those things, autofocus can be a decent feature for you. But for most of the time just sitting here, fixed focus is just fine. It just focuses on me. And I'm sitting here talking into my webcam. All right. So unless you're doing a lot of that other stuff, don't consider that and pay a lot of extra money for autofocus. All right. Next little checklist item is field of view. A lot of them are 65 degrees, 78 degrees or 90 degrees. So a lot of them will brag, oh, we shoot wide angle. Well, I can tell you in my office, wide angle, wide angle just makes it look worse because you see all the crap on the sides on my messy office. All right, so you want to be able to shoot tighter, uh, if you want. So having variable field of view can be helpful. But bragging about wide angle. In most of our situations where your computer is set up, your little office is set up and you don't want people seeing all the way the sides, and it's not that important for you.
[00:07:09] All right. Next thing is, especially if you don't do what I say and get some decent lights, is low light performance. Does the camera look all grainy and noisy? If you don't have perfect lighting, and what you're going to do is see a lot of people review these on YouTube and do side by side comparisons. And that's where you really want to go to pick the one that's right for you. But now you're going to understand a lot of these things they're talking about with frames per second and resolution and, and field of view FOV that's shortened and low light performance. Okay then another thing to consider. How does it mount? Now, the ones inside your computer, you know, you're kind of stuck with wherever they are and whatever they are. But a lot of external webcams have different mounts. They might have tripod mounts or monitor mounts, things like that. So you want to say, okay, for my use, am I going to set up a tripod behind my screen or do I need it to have it hanging right on my screen? You know, what's what's best for you? And then a lot of them have software where they can, uh, some of them can do like different backgrounds for you. I'm not in favor of that stuff because most of that stuff looks really terrible. All this green screen stuff people were trying to do. I mean, I had Hollywood training and lighting and green screen and, and I've been in the Actor's Guild and all this stuff.
[00:08:46] And, and most people just mess it up, look terrible on green screen and fake backgrounds. You're better off setting up a background bookcase or flowers or plants or something, and that way you wipe out that looking stupid by having weird green screen or fake backgrounds. Now you also have a feature some of them have called face tracking. Well, again, it's you pay extra for something that if you're just sitting as a talking head, you really don't need. In fact, sometimes it's better if you go to the like, for instance, I'm going to say, pretend I'm on a podcast interview and say, oh, let me grab this thing here. I wanted to talk about here, you know? So I look away and I don't need the camera to follow me over there. The coming in and out of the frame a little bit is more interesting and safer and less expensive than buying face tracking, say so. Don't spend extra for that unless you absolutely need it. Then privacy shutters. Well, some of them have a mechanical thing that goes over the lens so nobody can hack you and be watching you when you, uh, you know, when you don't even know the camera's on. Because sometimes the hackers can make it the camera turn on and there's no light that tells you it's on. And so you could pay extra for that.
[00:10:13] And some of them have them built in. But for years, I would just have a piece of manila folder paper, a little thick, like cardstock on a piece of tape, and just flop it over the camera when it wasn't in use. So, so don't pay extra for that. And also consider the cable length. A lot of them will tell you what the cable is. I have I bought this secondary webcam because I'm setting up a thing where I'm going to have a really oddball shot way up near the ceiling behind me, looking over head. You know, for some of my productions and and actually the the cord still wasn't long enough. I had to get an extension USB cable for that. So but for your normal use, usually the cables are long enough, as long as you have a place to plug it in. And is it Usb-c? Is it USB a? You know, all these are important on what what things you have in your computer to plug it in, and sometimes you have to get it. If you have too many things plugged into your computer, your USB ports, you got to get another little hub to plug more stuff in. I mean, I got eight, ten things I think plugged into my USB ports here. So, that's just a little primer. Like I said, your I o audio, I forgot about this one. A lot of them have built in mics. Guess what? Do not use a built in mic on a webcam.
[00:11:44] God help you if you do sound terrible. All right. Now, I have heard, you know, people on their their Mac book pros or whatever the Mac laptops called sounds pretty good as long as you're super close. But really you want to get an external microphone if you really want to sound good, because audio is more important than video. And we're talking about webcams and the video aspect of it. But if they can't hear, I mean, if they can't see or the the visual is not great. A lot of people hang in there with you. But if the if they can't hear you, they are gone. All right. So don't use the built in microphones that a lot of these things have. And with the back to the software a little bit too, you can make it zoom in and zoom out and blur the background on some of them and things like that. But, but like I said, don't pay extra for that stuff because if you just set up something nice. A lot of that stuff is just more hassle than what it's worth. If you set it up nice once your background and where you're going to be recording and so forth, you're going to be fine. And a lot of them you can just take with you if you're going to a hotel room or something. But again, it's easy to pack the webcam, but you've got to have a good microphone still.
[00:13:04] All right. So so there you go. All right. So check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And my school IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. That's the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. And I had the sweat blood and the school's been around for I think 13 years now. And a lot of these places that are trying to sell you stuff, there's no scrutiny whatsoever. They take your money, charge you a fortune. Nobody, you know has checked their curriculum. Nobody has. They're not responsible to anybody where I am. I got a state I have to recertify every year, uh, with this extensive thing every year. And I have to have a big bond, a $50,000 bond, just in case a student, you know, is not happy, you know? So, uh, yeah, it's, uh, you know, when you see this stuff, they call themselves colleges and universities and all this, it's all bullshit. All right, so this is the real deal. All right, so check that out at IMTCVA.org. Check out webcams and see, like I said, they're not going to make you look like a TV anchor by themselves. You got to have lighting and sound and all that stuff. But, uh, there's some, uh, checklist here to help you pick the right one for you. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.