Skip to main content

Dartwood 2K QHD USB Webcam with Built-in Microphone


 
consumer technology, webcam

 
There are few reviews about this product across the web - Target has the most, and the "company's" own site has none. Makes me think this is sold under various names. It was less expensive than the initial webcam I was looking at and easily returnable. Does the low price pay off?


Let's Have A Closer Look At...


Camera Quality

The Dartwood's resolution is 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 for video and camera. 

My internal Realtek resolution is 640 x 480 - A 0.307 Megapixel camera. At that poor resolution, why even put it in the machine. I sold phones with better cameras in them in 2013!

 Want an example of how that old camera operated? Click here.

 This Dartwood is not heavy, but I won't keep this on my laptop all of the time;  Fellow Adventurers will be happy to know it did not jostle from my laptop while outside in a spring wind.

For a time, when I unplugged it, Firefox reacted poorly. Intermittent freezing, slow response in the browser. In an odd, roundabout kind of way, an unrelated Firefox add-on that was causing problems may have contributed to that initial issue.

Despite bragging about an easy setup, plugging it in did not prompt any kind of auto installation of software. Not even the notification that would say "Installing [DEVICE NAME]. Even my settings only called it "Webcam" under "Bluetooth".  It doesn't have an option to eject like a jump (flash) drive would.

After disabling my integrated camera in Device Manager and it's 0.3 megapixel(s), the Dartwood took over.

You can find more exciting things in Device Manager. For instance, right click - properties - Events. You can see when it was configured (plugged in) and see the versions and dates of some drivers. This doesn't seem to have a manufacturer driver, and is using a Windows one that's pretty old. I won't say how old.

 

😶

 

Concerning? Maybe.

The quality is good for a lower-budget camera. There are many more options going up to 30 Fps for video and 3.7 MP for photos, the latter of will give you a very severe fish-eye effect.

The video will lag a touch while recording - Maybe not the best for live interactions  - But the resulting video is smooth and relatively clear. Much better than the integrated camera.

Because the Dartwood is attached by USB, I like picking it off my monitor and pointing it at things - A lot easier than trying to maneuver a heavy device.

The office is painted a slate blue, and somehow the setting of the light gives everything this underwater sea-green atmosphere, which I like.



Built-In Microphone

Here's a little bit of video - It still picks up the lower registers of my voice. I've considered training my voice to sound more feminine, but why? To fit a standard of beauty?

Nah, I'm good.

At first, I thought OBS didn't recognize my non-brand microphone here. Then I remembered - Each time I'm not using the microphone, I disable it. So I had to go enable it again, and all is well.

Speaking of OBS, the webcam will show in preview, but only record a black screen. Documentation shows that many Windows Updates simply aren't compatible with the software, which is a pain.

Zoom Integration

The webcam worked flawlessly with Zoom. The microphone picked up my voice at a low murmur, let alone at my normal volume. The visuals seem to work better with a virtual background also:

Who made this wallpaper? Feel free to let me know.

This is from the Animal Crossing Twitter account. 20 years of AC!

Overall, it works fairly well. Streamers will want to opt for something more permanent, with the potential for higher quality, but for a handful of meetings, you can do a lot worse.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making KPI Dashboards with PowerBI

 While this is the free tier, I cannot share or collaborate with others, nor can I publish content to other people's workspaces, but they will not stop me from screenshooting and recording these self-taught adventures,so! I'm doing this because I idly searched "Mattel careers" and "Information Technology", and seeing a bulletpoint saying the following: Analytical and reporting skills such as creating dashboards and establishing KPIs such as experience with PowerBI, Cognos, Tableau, and Google Data Lake/AWS is preferred And thought "Well, I've used Tableau, and I've heard about PowerBI,  even if its in-demandness is questionable , so how similar is it? And can I write about it?"  First, PowerBI (PIB) does have a downloadable, local version, but apparently Windows-only. I could download the .exe but I couldn't run it / drag it to applications on my MacBook.  Not a problem, we'll use the online SaaS version, and a dataset found here, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Perplexity AI: The App, For The Everyday Person

   Perplexity AI, according to BuiltIn , is an AI-powered search engine - and it's now valued at 1 8$Billion dollars, with a B. I had it on my phone for research testing - something I do between contracts for money - and simply kept it all this time. With it making a resurgence, I can show you if it's viable for every day use cases.  I did not use it to generate "art" or writing.  Screen Reading and Photo Identification. I have used Perplexity to read Chinese characters on my screen, asking to point out the radicals, tone, and meaning of unfamiliar characters. There are minor differences between what Perplexity answers with and what Duolingo and DuChinese deal with, but I know enough Chinese* to figure out the difference - though a recent study calls the accuracy into question. For instance, below I've asked it what the radical is in  æ°´ (shui, water)      [alt: The character in your image is  æ°´ , which is the Chinese character for "wate...
Post a Comment
Read more

Log Sorting with AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights

 The cool thing is, I was contracted to make these videos in collaboration with CloudAvail Technology Consulting to help people decide which service they wanted to use for their logging - AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Insights, DataDog, or New Relic. I'm searching through nginx logs. I have accompanying videos of each service that you can find on the CloudAvail Youtube page; See these links to go to the DataDog and NewRelic posts.   The idea was to be subjective in the videos, but I can be objective on my personal blog.     CloudWatch     The syntax is odd, but easy to grasp. Sort log data by IP addresses, message codes, and status codes. The simplest query system, but not quite robust.   Insights       The syntax has changed - Vastly. I see major SQL influences. You can see that in how the parse function works - in this case, it's often taken pieces of a pre-existing standard - in this case, message - and breaking them into their own c...
Post a Comment
Read more