Bulbs & Fittings Ideas

really makes a good face on nba 2k15 (why I bought it) really accurate (:

I picked up the Playstation 4 Camera alongside my PS4 and it was the first thing I tried out.

After less than 24 hours it’s clear that the camera has a lot of potential but is still missing a compelling gaming function. The Playroom set of minigames that come with the camera are made by Double Fine, and are a lot of fun but very very short. You won’t get a ton of play out of them.

The really nice feature is the facial auto-login and tracking to see who is holding what controller. Very quick and seamless.

The sensor itself is only 720P, which is a bit of a disappointment, but its low light performance is surprisingly good. I used it with the lights off and just morning low light coming through the closed shades, and it seemed to report a much brighter room than the one I was sitting in. The image is fairly grainy, but it’s definitely serviceable. Suspect the choice to go with a 720P sensor was so
they could make larger cells that absorb more light.

It also has a very wide field of vision. Definitely larger than the original Kinect.

Speaking of Kinect, the gesture recognition seems to be decent. You can wave at the Playroom robots and they wave back. But there isn’t an app or anything that lets you see what the PS Camera is "seeing" as far as gesture detection so it’s hard to really know. No kinect-like Skeleton overlay, at least none that I’ve found as yet.

Haven’t used the camera for Twitch yet but I suspect that is its real draw. And it’s high enough resolution that you should be able to do a PIP of your face while gaming and still be relatively recognizable.

Four stars for simply working well and being nice and compact. Much prefer this size for a camera, being able to tuck it under the lip of my TV stand on top of the Wii U sensor bar, than a large chunky footprint of my 360 Kinect, and eventually XB1 Kinect 2.0, both of which are just a bit too large for me aesthetically in my living room. I always put the Kinect camera away when I’m not using it because it just looks too big … the Playstation 4 Camera is nice and unobtrusive and I can tuck its cord away to be nearly invisible. Considering motion gaming makes up about … oh … 0.0000003% of my Television time, making it small is a big thing to get me to leave it connected.

Would update to 5 stars if there is ever an actually compelling gaming reason to own the camera, but I’m getting it more for video chatting with friends and for the promise of future voice commands. But I can understand why most people would opt to skip the camera for now … there isn’t a huge reason to get it yet.

WARNING at the time of writing this review about three days after launch it should be known you cannot turn off the mic for this camera. A cool feature of this camera is that you don’t need to use the microphone and earbud that comes with your PS4 for people in your voice chats or online multiplayer to hear you. Unfortunately a glaring oversight by Sony you cannot turn off the mic at all. You will need to unplug the camera. It’s little things like this that boggle my mind that Sony didn’t think of leading up to the release of the PS4.

UPDATED: If you start a private voice conversation with no one it will mute the camera in multiplayer games.
UPDATE 2: As of Firmware 1.6 you can mute the camera mic.

I got this camera because when I live stream I want people to be able to see my face (I play with my face because I’m disabled so people will want to see that in action) and the camera works well for that and in that purpose. You can also turn the console on and do numerous commands with the voice functionality. And while nowhere near as refined as Microsoft’s Kinect is I think in time it can be very useful.

Now the mini games that come with it (I mean come with your PS4) are kind of cool and the types of games that you show off to your friends when you want to show them how far technology has come. But after a few times you will really play that are again. And how games will take advantage of video technology remains to be seen a big way.

But for live streaming and showing face cams this is definitely a useful product. And it works straight out the box and is super easy to set up.

So all in all I think it’s a cool albeit niche product for many people.

Thanks for reading.