The Perfect Webcam Solution is Not Here Yet: A Review of Econ Systems Webcams

As someone who has expressed frustration with the lack of innovation and variety in webcams on the market, I was excited to try out the latest offering from Econ Systems. While this webcam may not be perfect for content creators, it's a great example of what the industry can achieve when manufacturers prioritize quality and features.

In my opinion, there isn't enough webcam-focused products on the market, but econ systems provides an impressive array of camera modules and sensors that demonstrate innovation and attention to detail. The fact that they offer such a wide range of options is truly remarkable. Upon closer inspection, I was impressed by the specs of this particular model, which features a 2-megapixel Sony Star vez amx 290 sensor and a high-quality M2 mount lens.

One of the standout features of this webcam is its ability to capture high-resolution images at 1080p60, as well as JPEG or BMP photos. It also boasts digital zoom up to 16 times, which may be excessive for some users but can be useful in certain situations. Additionally, it has a D noise filter to reduce digital artifacts and improve image quality. Econ Systems also provides an ECAM view software that allows users to monitor and control the camera remotely.

Econ Systems' webcam is UVC capable, making it compatible with both Windows and Linux operating systems. They have officially supported both platforms and provide a comprehensive user experience. However, I encountered some frustration when trying to record video at resolutions higher than 640x360. Econ Systems offers three different modes: HDR, HDR2 (which made little difference in my testing), and a low-light night mode that I'm excited to test out later.

Speaking of prices, the webcam is priced competitively, with an MSRP of $99. While it's not the most affordable option on the market, it's definitely worth considering for content creators who require high-quality video and image capture capabilities. As someone who has spent a lot of time criticizing devices that produce pre-compressed H.264 footage, I appreciate the fact that this webcam allows users to work with raw footage.

In terms of latency, I did experience around 9 frames of delay between my audio mixer interface and the webcam feed. However, this can be easily accounted for using OBS or other software tools, making it a minor issue for most users. The real advantage of this webcam lies in its ability to capture high-quality images with minimal artifacts.

For those looking for a reliable and feature-rich webcam that's suitable for industry applications, such as microscopes, car backup systems, security cameras, or even traditional vlogging, this Econ Systems model is definitely worth considering. I hope this review has given you an idea of what the market can achieve when manufacturers prioritize quality and features.

Product Details:

The webcam I reviewed is available on the Econ Systems website at [insert link]. The company also offers other high-quality webcam models, including the Hyperion, which shares similar specs and features with the model I reviewed. For more information about Econ Systems webcams, please visit their website at [insert link].

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I'd like to talk a little bit about the other side of the webcam market I've covered quite a few webcams on a self a lot on my to do list on the channel with regards to content creation live-streaming YouTube in vlogging things like that and my frustration with them and how there seems to be little innovation in the market and you have little control over the cameras and there's basically Logitech and a couple Microsoft cameras and that's it on the market but there are very different sides of the market that a lot of content creators don't look at and I've been trying to get into it for a little while and I finally reached out to a company called econ systems who have sent over their Hyperion web cam which is quite the name for a camera I love it and I will save up front that this is not a camera designed for content creation whatsoever but that's how I'm gonna be covering it but I'm also gonna touch on how it's supposed to be used you see this camera is an industrial camera there's an entire market an entire industry of integrated and otherwise built to suit basically cameras and webcams for specific industry related purposes such as actually they have a whole list they provide on their website of target applications for this camera indoor and outdoor smart home civilian surveillance so this kind of camera may end up in a security camera that you install in your home and you just won't know it they're parking lot management car dash cams and backing up cameras embedded into other devices digital microscopes mining kiosks video conferencing things like that video conferencing of course being as close as we can get on that list to this purpose right here this camera however comes with no enclosure it has some exposed surface mount components in the PCB and it's got a heatsink on the back and there's no mounting solution whatsoever so I'm using a pretty ridiculous mounting solution here I'm using a so I have my normal wall mount for my normal camera here which in my Panasonic g7 which was literally anchored into the wall so I have a friction arm mounted to that wall mount arm coming off why coming off of the friction arm I have a smartphone clamp that's typically used to put your phone up here and vlog this way and I just have the camera barely strapped in there so I'm glad my cat didn't just rip that off the mountains and that's all crashing and crumbling down but so you you will if you do want to use this kind of camera for counting creation you will have to get creative in your mounting but you can totally 3d print a case the two modules that can it consists of it can actually separate and you can use that to further embed in your existing device it has a mini USB 2.0 connection which normally I would complain about but again for this purpose that's the idea and it comes with a fairly short cable I've had to use a separate cable here to get the length running to my computer you can see it dangling in the corner of the screen it comes with one that is designed to be compatible with a low-power USB ports so it has two ends so it can get all the power that it needs and this is literally just a Star tech cable however you don't need to use both ends if you're using a desktop plug with you know full power draw and that's what I'm using here just a standard mini USB plug you're good to go this camera goes up to 1080p 60 frames per second in h.264 and it can do 720p 60 and things like that and then it can do 1920 by 10 72 a cat is talking to the birds it can do 1920 by 10 72 apparently that those eight pixels were enough to make the difference in terms of bandwidth or processing power in MJPEG mode now despite the fact that it uses more bandwidth apparently and can only be used in the 1072 mode the MJPEG mode in my opinion looks worse so I am using the h.264 mode now I did a little behind the scenes vlog for my patreon Xand channel supporters and things like that in the MJPEG mode so I will include a clip of that here but personally I have gotten the best results out of the h.264 mode so in terms of specs that's what you're working with again for purely content creation purposes not the best possible scenario I would want USB 3 with Yui 2 or something like that but for what this is this is pretty cool and the quality you get from it is actually okay and I'm gonna touch on something that's really cool about it in a moment now it has a manual I believe it's a m2 mount lens so you actually focus it and that's gonna drive people nuts but you focus it by screwing the lens closer or further away to nail focus here so using my beard as a focus point I believe that's in focus now and overall it looks fine so if you wanted to use something like this for content quality like most people aren't going to notice and if you're using it to build into your next project this is honestly gonna serve you quite well and this isn't the only thing they offer by any stretch I actually receive pretty much at this point I think weekly emails from them ever since I started working from them I'm working for them not for them with them on this project words are hard today which is what I say in every video ever since I got on an email it's like they're announcing new cameras with HDR and all sorts of craziness new modules to implement into projects and they have a lot going on so this is by no means they're only offering but what is really cool about this camera is it has a wide dynamic range and high dynamic range mode now this is not video production TV HDR that you would get in like a 4k blu-ray or something that's not that kind of HDR the HDR here is a literally high dynamic range which for a camera is important and you might notice in this video especially compared to literally any other video I've posted you can see everything everything I have a big LED panel here blasting my face with light which is what I normally use for my normal camera setup and you can still see me just fine I am lit up I am fully exposed here I might be a tad overexposed here but it gives me that beautification filter look which helps cover my eye bags you can see my entire living room lit up that's normally in darkness because of the contrast of the harsh light here versus the darker light back there the window isn't blown out even though it's still it's 11 a.m. it is super freakin bright outside right now normally this windows blown out on any camera the back window back there is always for sure blown out and it's only sort of blown out in that very back sliver and even the direct sources of light are not as glowy blown out as they normally are this is the power of something that has actual high dynamic range sensor inside of it this is really freaking cool you can see everything which helps a lot with composing your video I will show even though it will be from a different angle I will show the difference of what you get with this kind of sensor versus an $800 camera the sub 2r which doesn't have a high dynamic range sensor it has a very low dynamic range sensor and you gets puttan this is a very common problem among webcams where you get hot spots where you are completely blown out and then everything else is really dark with this you get a clean clear picture ready to go for comparison's sake this is what my Panasonic g7 my main camera looks like in the exact same lining five minutes after finishing the rest of this recording here setup again you could I'm not blown out I'm sharper I'm working with the 4k signal it's it's clearly a superior looking image with much greater depth of field and a bigger sensor in yada-yada but the actual dynamic range of what you see throughout the room is actually lower even if you know there's more detail for what you do see in yada-yada-yada but that windows blown out it's much darker in the background this is the comparison I wanted to give you because there are a lot of use cases even for content creation where you'd want everything fairly evenly lit up so there you go and for another point of comparison this is another nd developed web web-cam camera industry camera tinkerers camera that uses a similar kind of sensor and costs $800 this is the sub 2r which is a camera that as I continue to use it I discover has a terribly low dynamic range to the extent that if I get too close to my light I get blown out but everything otherwise is pretty dark and gritty that helps show just how cool the Hyperion actually is it's not the sharpest image in the world it's not the most clean image in the world due to compression artifacts and things like that and you can get some weird muddiness of super sharp details when you move around a little bit but for the purposes of twitch streaming and stuff honestly it's fine like it this is awesome like this camera is really cool and the fact that you don't have to mess without it like you don't have to worry about it going out of focus if you end up moving around a lot and you need autofocus obviously this won't be the solution for you but in most cases especially for this kind of video like you are posting up a camera on one spot and that is it so I am super happy with this I know that a lot of people are gonna be like ah that doesn't look like very good but for what it is this is seriously impressive especially compared to most webcams out there a problem you will notice in some of the footage is that the back lights have a weird kind of flicker to them and this is due to the camera being set to a pal refresh rate and it doesn't give me the option for any sort of NTSC option which is a little frustrating as someone here in the states with NTSC cameras and they probably sell different cameras within DSC options but with NTSC power you get this weird kind of flicker and it's trying to compensate for it and try to mitigate it but that's what that is and if you're in the PAL region it's fine but I'm sure they have a NTSC option somewhere so as I've said this isn't the perfect webcam solution for anybody this isn't even a webcam targeted at content creators but there is a whole industry here and I recommend they're not paying me that for this they're not looking at this video before it's posted anything like that but I do recommend just going to their website at the econ systems website and looking at all the different webcam models they have because even as someone who myself has expressed sentiment of frustration that there isn't enough webcams on the market there isn't enough innovation and stuff just seeing how many webcam modules and sensors and things that they have implemented the market that are there is pretty crazy like there is a lot here one thing I also wanted to mention is that econ systems provides a ridiculous amount of documentation and information about the camera once you're signed in with the little code that comes in your box that in the box comes with the lens the camera the cable and a little download code and they give you the app for Linux the app for Windows product sheets data sheets they give you a firmware updater they give you so much information much more than most of the mainstream options actually give you which they kind of need to if you're supposed to be developing projects from this device I want to run through a couple specs here this does have a two megapixel Sony Star vez amx 290 sensor on it and then again it has the little m2 mount lens that comes with one in the package the main actual mode for this is 640 by 360 however you can of course bump it up to 1080p 60 here as I mentioned it can take JPEG or BMP photos it has digital zoom up to 16 times I'm not gonna mess with that it does have a D noise filter so they do have the ECAM view software and then it's called qt cam on linux because this is a UVC capable webcam and so it works on Windows and Linux and they have officials like they officially supported on both platforms and provide a program the camera app that they include however I do run into some frustration where I can't seem to get it to actually record anything higher than 640 by 360 but they have three different modes they have the HDR one mode which should be what this is in they have the HDR two mode which in this specific situation I didn't notice a lot of difference but again for situations where you're like driving around outside or embedding in certain use cases it might be worthwhile and then they actually have a low light night mode which I'm going to test this evening and include a clip in this video although it may be at super low resolution due to the application but they have an actual night mode to see more in the dark which is really cool so it's expensive for what most people would want to buy for a webcam because it is $99 again it's cheaper than the sub 2 R which is $800 you can't really see it behind my mic arm but it's back there it's cheaper than a lot of webcams for 1080p60 and while I typically spend my time in my content creation videos complaining about devices that give pre compressed h.264 footage because there's more latency I think there's about nine frames of latency from my audio mixer interface to the webcam like after - I have to delay the video or delay the audio by one of the other I don't remember which at this point but you know there's there's a nine frame difference of the audio and video coming in that you have to account for and you can account for that in OBS or what have you and you know your system has to spend more effort decompressing the footage and recompressing it and things like that but for a lot of people especially with a high you know a decently high-end system it's not gonna matter and this image is a lot better than most people's webcams that is completely like blown out or completely dark and things like that like this is a really good image especially if you want to do traditional vlogging or like a video where you need people to see what's going on and not just have a dramatic like high contrast video like I normally post this might be a solution for you and I the point of this video was just to introduce you to this market these are cameras designed for industry applications again microscopes car backup systems security cameras things like that but you can put them in anything they sell them to you to implement into anything and that's really cool so just wanted to share this with you product link to the data monitor this one the Hyperion again sick name on econ systems website will be on the link in the description below it's not an affiliate link or anything like that hit the like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education I mean pose voxi to make tech easier and more fun I will see you in the next videotoday I'd like to talk a little bit about the other side of the webcam market I've covered quite a few webcams on a self a lot on my to do list on the channel with regards to content creation live-streaming YouTube in vlogging things like that and my frustration with them and how there seems to be little innovation in the market and you have little control over the cameras and there's basically Logitech and a couple Microsoft cameras and that's it on the market but there are very different sides of the market that a lot of content creators don't look at and I've been trying to get into it for a little while and I finally reached out to a company called econ systems who have sent over their Hyperion web cam which is quite the name for a camera I love it and I will save up front that this is not a camera designed for content creation whatsoever but that's how I'm gonna be covering it but I'm also gonna touch on how it's supposed to be used you see this camera is an industrial camera there's an entire market an entire industry of integrated and otherwise built to suit basically cameras and webcams for specific industry related purposes such as actually they have a whole list they provide on their website of target applications for this camera indoor and outdoor smart home civilian surveillance so this kind of camera may end up in a security camera that you install in your home and you just won't know it they're parking lot management car dash cams and backing up cameras embedded into other devices digital microscopes mining kiosks video conferencing things like that video conferencing of course being as close as we can get on that list to this purpose right here this camera however comes with no enclosure it has some exposed surface mount components in the PCB and it's got a heatsink on the back and there's no mounting solution whatsoever so I'm using a pretty ridiculous mounting solution here I'm using a so I have my normal wall mount for my normal camera here which in my Panasonic g7 which was literally anchored into the wall so I have a friction arm mounted to that wall mount arm coming off why coming off of the friction arm I have a smartphone clamp that's typically used to put your phone up here and vlog this way and I just have the camera barely strapped in there so I'm glad my cat didn't just rip that off the mountains and that's all crashing and crumbling down but so you you will if you do want to use this kind of camera for counting creation you will have to get creative in your mounting but you can totally 3d print a case the two modules that can it consists of it can actually separate and you can use that to further embed in your existing device it has a mini USB 2.0 connection which normally I would complain about but again for this purpose that's the idea and it comes with a fairly short cable I've had to use a separate cable here to get the length running to my computer you can see it dangling in the corner of the screen it comes with one that is designed to be compatible with a low-power USB ports so it has two ends so it can get all the power that it needs and this is literally just a Star tech cable however you don't need to use both ends if you're using a desktop plug with you know full power draw and that's what I'm using here just a standard mini USB plug you're good to go this camera goes up to 1080p 60 frames per second in h.264 and it can do 720p 60 and things like that and then it can do 1920 by 10 72 a cat is talking to the birds it can do 1920 by 10 72 apparently that those eight pixels were enough to make the difference in terms of bandwidth or processing power in MJPEG mode now despite the fact that it uses more bandwidth apparently and can only be used in the 1072 mode the MJPEG mode in my opinion looks worse so I am using the h.264 mode now I did a little behind the scenes vlog for my patreon Xand channel supporters and things like that in the MJPEG mode so I will include a clip of that here but personally I have gotten the best results out of the h.264 mode so in terms of specs that's what you're working with again for purely content creation purposes not the best possible scenario I would want USB 3 with Yui 2 or something like that but for what this is this is pretty cool and the quality you get from it is actually okay and I'm gonna touch on something that's really cool about it in a moment now it has a manual I believe it's a m2 mount lens so you actually focus it and that's gonna drive people nuts but you focus it by screwing the lens closer or further away to nail focus here so using my beard as a focus point I believe that's in focus now and overall it looks fine so if you wanted to use something like this for content quality like most people aren't going to notice and if you're using it to build into your next project this is honestly gonna serve you quite well and this isn't the only thing they offer by any stretch I actually receive pretty much at this point I think weekly emails from them ever since I started working from them I'm working for them not for them with them on this project words are hard today which is what I say in every video ever since I got on an email it's like they're announcing new cameras with HDR and all sorts of craziness new modules to implement into projects and they have a lot going on so this is by no means they're only offering but what is really cool about this camera is it has a wide dynamic range and high dynamic range mode now this is not video production TV HDR that you would get in like a 4k blu-ray or something that's not that kind of HDR the HDR here is a literally high dynamic range which for a camera is important and you might notice in this video especially compared to literally any other video I've posted you can see everything everything I have a big LED panel here blasting my face with light which is what I normally use for my normal camera setup and you can still see me just fine I am lit up I am fully exposed here I might be a tad overexposed here but it gives me that beautification filter look which helps cover my eye bags you can see my entire living room lit up that's normally in darkness because of the contrast of the harsh light here versus the darker light back there the window isn't blown out even though it's still it's 11 a.m. it is super freakin bright outside right now normally this windows blown out on any camera the back window back there is always for sure blown out and it's only sort of blown out in that very back sliver and even the direct sources of light are not as glowy blown out as they normally are this is the power of something that has actual high dynamic range sensor inside of it this is really freaking cool you can see everything which helps a lot with composing your video I will show even though it will be from a different angle I will show the difference of what you get with this kind of sensor versus an $800 camera the sub 2r which doesn't have a high dynamic range sensor it has a very low dynamic range sensor and you gets puttan this is a very common problem among webcams where you get hot spots where you are completely blown out and then everything else is really dark with this you get a clean clear picture ready to go for comparison's sake this is what my Panasonic g7 my main camera looks like in the exact same lining five minutes after finishing the rest of this recording here setup again you could I'm not blown out I'm sharper I'm working with the 4k signal it's it's clearly a superior looking image with much greater depth of field and a bigger sensor in yada-yada but the actual dynamic range of what you see throughout the room is actually lower even if you know there's more detail for what you do see in yada-yada-yada but that windows blown out it's much darker in the background this is the comparison I wanted to give you because there are a lot of use cases even for content creation where you'd want everything fairly evenly lit up so there you go and for another point of comparison this is another nd developed web web-cam camera industry camera tinkerers camera that uses a similar kind of sensor and costs $800 this is the sub 2r which is a camera that as I continue to use it I discover has a terribly low dynamic range to the extent that if I get too close to my light I get blown out but everything otherwise is pretty dark and gritty that helps show just how cool the Hyperion actually is it's not the sharpest image in the world it's not the most clean image in the world due to compression artifacts and things like that and you can get some weird muddiness of super sharp details when you move around a little bit but for the purposes of twitch streaming and stuff honestly it's fine like it this is awesome like this camera is really cool and the fact that you don't have to mess without it like you don't have to worry about it going out of focus if you end up moving around a lot and you need autofocus obviously this won't be the solution for you but in most cases especially for this kind of video like you are posting up a camera on one spot and that is it so I am super happy with this I know that a lot of people are gonna be like ah that doesn't look like very good but for what it is this is seriously impressive especially compared to most webcams out there a problem you will notice in some of the footage is that the back lights have a weird kind of flicker to them and this is due to the camera being set to a pal refresh rate and it doesn't give me the option for any sort of NTSC option which is a little frustrating as someone here in the states with NTSC cameras and they probably sell different cameras within DSC options but with NTSC power you get this weird kind of flicker and it's trying to compensate for it and try to mitigate it but that's what that is and if you're in the PAL region it's fine but I'm sure they have a NTSC option somewhere so as I've said this isn't the perfect webcam solution for anybody this isn't even a webcam targeted at content creators but there is a whole industry here and I recommend they're not paying me that for this they're not looking at this video before it's posted anything like that but I do recommend just going to their website at the econ systems website and looking at all the different webcam models they have because even as someone who myself has expressed sentiment of frustration that there isn't enough webcams on the market there isn't enough innovation and stuff just seeing how many webcam modules and sensors and things that they have implemented the market that are there is pretty crazy like there is a lot here one thing I also wanted to mention is that econ systems provides a ridiculous amount of documentation and information about the camera once you're signed in with the little code that comes in your box that in the box comes with the lens the camera the cable and a little download code and they give you the app for Linux the app for Windows product sheets data sheets they give you a firmware updater they give you so much information much more than most of the mainstream options actually give you which they kind of need to if you're supposed to be developing projects from this device I want to run through a couple specs here this does have a two megapixel Sony Star vez amx 290 sensor on it and then again it has the little m2 mount lens that comes with one in the package the main actual mode for this is 640 by 360 however you can of course bump it up to 1080p 60 here as I mentioned it can take JPEG or BMP photos it has digital zoom up to 16 times I'm not gonna mess with that it does have a D noise filter so they do have the ECAM view software and then it's called qt cam on linux because this is a UVC capable webcam and so it works on Windows and Linux and they have officials like they officially supported on both platforms and provide a program the camera app that they include however I do run into some frustration where I can't seem to get it to actually record anything higher than 640 by 360 but they have three different modes they have the HDR one mode which should be what this is in they have the HDR two mode which in this specific situation I didn't notice a lot of difference but again for situations where you're like driving around outside or embedding in certain use cases it might be worthwhile and then they actually have a low light night mode which I'm going to test this evening and include a clip in this video although it may be at super low resolution due to the application but they have an actual night mode to see more in the dark which is really cool so it's expensive for what most people would want to buy for a webcam because it is $99 again it's cheaper than the sub 2 R which is $800 you can't really see it behind my mic arm but it's back there it's cheaper than a lot of webcams for 1080p60 and while I typically spend my time in my content creation videos complaining about devices that give pre compressed h.264 footage because there's more latency I think there's about nine frames of latency from my audio mixer interface to the webcam like after - I have to delay the video or delay the audio by one of the other I don't remember which at this point but you know there's there's a nine frame difference of the audio and video coming in that you have to account for and you can account for that in OBS or what have you and you know your system has to spend more effort decompressing the footage and recompressing it and things like that but for a lot of people especially with a high you know a decently high-end system it's not gonna matter and this image is a lot better than most people's webcams that is completely like blown out or completely dark and things like that like this is a really good image especially if you want to do traditional vlogging or like a video where you need people to see what's going on and not just have a dramatic like high contrast video like I normally post this might be a solution for you and I the point of this video was just to introduce you to this market these are cameras designed for industry applications again microscopes car backup systems security cameras things like that but you can put them in anything they sell them to you to implement into anything and that's really cool so just wanted to share this with you product link to the data monitor this one the Hyperion again sick name on econ systems website will be on the link in the description below it's not an affiliate link or anything like that hit the like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education I mean pose voxi to make tech easier and more fun I will see you in the next video\n"