Excellent sensor, love the form factor, garbage white balance, bad lens
I had high hopes for this webcam to use as a document camera for my Cooking with Cale open-source STEM cookbook live streams. I need to zoom in and the Mokose UC40 and IMX317 are too noisy. The IMX477 looks excellent in auto white balance mode, but the white balance is unusable. You will also want to replace the stock lens. The stock lens is 3MP, so when you zoom in you'll notice it will never actually be sharp in focus.
If you want a 170-degree lens try the 2.5mm 1/2.5" f1.2 lens, it works perfect on this and the image is spectacular. The 3.2mm 12MP 1/1.7" lens is the best lens I've found. There are some expensive C-Mount lenses that might work, but most of them are 2/3", so you're better off with a UC70, which doesn't have the white balance problem but I still can't find an acceptable lens for a document camera, which requires low barrel distortion and low aperture.
Sadly there are no 4K webcams that are perfect document cameras. The only acceptable ones I've found are the Mokose C100 85-degree model with M12 lens, and for ultra-wide angle the UC70 with 3.2mm 12MP 1/1.7" lens is the best; it's crazy hard to find a good 4K/8MP lens. A 3MP or 5MP lens lens will never quite be in focus when you zoom in 2x (1-to-4 pixel ration). Most of the M12 lenses are for the 1/2.3" sensor, the IMX477 is 1/2.3" and so is GoPro, but this camera has a built-in IR cut filter. You need to get the C100 (IMX377) with the 85-degree M12 lens, not the zoom models, because it doesn't have a cutoff filter that blocks the M12 lenses. There is also a much larger selection of no-distortion M12 lenses, but you'll need a 4K HDMI capture card to use 4K, the C100 only does 1080p out the USB 3.0 port.
K
Kunde
★★★★★
Bad factory-adjustment, otherwise great camera
I bought the camera to complement/replace an ELP CS-mount camera used for video conferences during working from home. Unfortunately, the Arducam is not available in Germany (or the whole EU at all, respectively).
Like the ELP camera, the Arducam is uvc-compliant, i.e., they can both be used as a plug-and-play device without requiring additional drivers except from the standard USB video drivers provided by the operating system (the uvcvideo Linux kernel module in my case).
However, coming from the IMX317-powered ELP webcam, the IMX477 in the Arducam is a huge improvement in terms of image quality. Especially in combination with the high-rate Arducam USB interface enabling smooth video streams. Even uncompressed RGB3/YU12/YV12 streams can be used at the same frame rates as when using JPEG compression (MJPEG), although the interface is only USB-2.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned, the camera came with a counter-intuitive "calibration": Aside from not being adjusted to conform the CS mount flange distance (which is an issue almost all CS-mount cases used for these kind of "webcams" have), the image sensor was assembled in the wrong orientation. Bothersome but fixable in less than two minutes – just remove the screws that hold the assembly in place and rotate the assembly (and the cover plate on the back) by 180°.
Adjusting for the correct flange distance is always a bit fiddly but possible with this camera, though.
The infinity adjustment I made is by far not perfect but it is sufficient for my use case as conference camera.
The provided 6mm lens (fingerprinted prior delivery) is quite nice and provides a good image quality; it even seems to be (multi- ?) coated. I prefer my industrial-grade C-mount lenses over the Arducam lens, though.
A nice feature is the built-in IR-cut filter that can be removed if anyone may need to take IR photos/videos.
All in all, a very nice and high-quality camera for use as a conference webcam.
Appendix (2021-07-26): After having used the camera for some months while being forced using the Zoom conferencing software, I noticed that the Arducam controller does not offer the option to provide a 4:3 sensor HD readout for the video stream. This is, however, rather a limitation in Zoom (Linux only?). Other programmes work fine with either resolution or readout mode, respectively. Consequently, the image will be vertically cropped resulting in a narrower viewing angle compared to my old IMX317 camera with respect to "HD quality".
Furthermore, the IMX477 sensor seems to struggle somehow under low light conditions (relatively high noise) and high dynamic range lighting (easily blown-out highlights). The first could be a result of the quite dense IR-cut filter and smaller pixel size compared to the IMX317 one. I will try changing the filter to a less dense one at some time and see if would help.
The latter can only be resolved by ensuring a proper lighting set-up with a limited dynamic range – for which reason I have changed the Arducam's purpose to serve as a document camera on a reproduction stand now, for the lectures I am giving at my University.
Still, this camera is one of the best hassle-free (plug-and-play) options for using industrial-grade or professional lenses with a USB "webcam".
