Mid-Monitor Camera Mounting
I wanted to capture my camera mounting journey in a public place so I can more easily refer to it. That said, this is quite likely one of my most trivial blog posts in recent memory.
1. In the Beginning
When the pandemic hit, and most of the tech world was searching for in-stock monitors and cameras, one of the problems I became obsessed with was where to mount my camera. Very quickly it became obvious that the challenge with standard camera placement (at the time most cameras were being mounted on top of monitors, but some were to the side) is that when someone is looking at your picture, because that’s not where the camera is, they look like they’re looking away from you. I wanted to give people the same experience they had when we would chat in person — if I’m talking with you, most of the time I should be looking at you and you should see me looking at you.
This was early in the days of figuring out how to set up home workspaces (compared to the world today), and it wasn’t easy to find approaches online to solving this problem, so with probably a dozen or more Home Depot trips I came up with my own very much kludged solution to having my camera mounted in the middle of my screen:
The camera in this case is a Huddly Go (the first pandemic camera I got. I replaced it relatively quickly). Glued to the top of the monitor was a home-built rail system that connected to the vertical clear plastic strip seen above, to which was mounted the camera. When not in used, this strip could be rotated up and out of the way. Once this worked, it worked and I wasn’t inclined to continue optimizations.
Until my monitor broke. Why does that matter? Because the mounting system above was glued to my monitor (which admittedly is not an ideal approach. Again, this was the first, kludgy, attempt). The good news was that my monitor broke in January/2022 — almost two years into the pandemic and working from home, and by now there were a plethora of approaches to mounting cameras.
2. Pure Vijim
By now, desk mounting systems were proliferating, and I ended up using most of a Vijim LS08 system for my next attempt
By now, I had gone through several cameras, and settled on the Logitech BRIO (which I’m still very fond of). The Vijim setup is quite nice — the angle on the horizontal arm is fixed, so I could keep the same orientation and height while just swinging that horizontal arm out of the way when I didn’t want to use the camera.
This worked well. The downside was that very thick horizontal arm, which on occasion got in the way — less for 1o1s, but more for meetings where people were presenting material that would end up being obscured by that horizontal arm.
3. The Upside Down
The horizontal arm continued to annoy me, and so I took advantage of the fact the Vijim LS08 had another arm in addition to the two shown above, and two 4.5" tripod extenders, to mount the camera this way
In terms of the physical and logistical setup for the camera, I really like this. It was still easy to swing the camera out of the way, and the only occlusion other than the camera itself was the very very thin tripod extenders. It was clean.
There’s only one real problem I’ve found with this solution — the camera is mounted upside down, and that means the image is flipped. That means that this was the first approach to require a software to run to flip the image. Turns out that Logitech’s answer for this would consistently crash on my M1 Mac, but both OBS (which is not super user friendly, and is massively overpowered for this) and Webcam Effects (which was free, but in order to use it for streaming I ended up paying $20 to enable that capability) were usable for doing this. That was a minor annoyance, though, at least partially because one of the side-effects of using Webcam Effects’ virtual camera is that when I would start meetings, for the first 10 seconds or so the virtual camera would not output an image.
4. Are We There Yet? The Wall-E Configuration
I wanted to reconsider option 2, but with the horizontal arm below the monitor, and a vertical extension going from it to the camera. The problem is that the Vijim doesn’t let you connect arms at anything but the tips of other arms. But with the addition of a relatively inexpensive SMALLRIG Super Clamp (and reusing the same 4.5" tripod adapters as above), we now got
And honestly? This works pretty well. The mount itself doesn’t let you easily change the height of the camera compared to the monitor, but since it’s not attached to the monitor — and the monitor is on its own Fully monitor arm — I can actually move the monitor around to make the camera be wherever I want it to be compared to the monitor. It’s a nice, very clean, solution, with the same minimal occlusion that option 3 above had, but with the camera mounted in the right orientation so no software is necessary to correct the image. It also means that since there’s a ballmount at the bottom of that extension, it can be rotated to have the camera point more “up” or more “down” as necessary to get the right angle.
This was the winner so far. By this point, however, I had already placed an order for a Plexicam camera mount so I figured I’d also test-drive the Plexicam. Which gets us to the final candidate
5. Plexicam? More like Plexican’t
Despite having a largeish 34" monitor, I opted to just get the Plexicam Pro. Also, since for a piece of clear plastic it’s relatively expensive, I didn’t feel like springing the extra $35 for the BRIO-specific shelf.
The end result was … OK.
We’ve got some problems here, though. For one thing, if you see the picture above, you’ll see a translucent shelf. That’s because when I mount the camera as close to the monitor as it fits, the mounting shelf gets into the field of view. Mounting it far enough forward for this to not happen means that the camera is quite forward of the monitor:
The other problem is that — absent the ability to manage the angle of the camera — it’s facing too far down, which means it shows my floor. Which is unideal. Fixing this in a way that doesn’t obstruct image likely means putting some soft material on the back of the Plexicam mount to push it away from the monitor. I could easily do that, but one of my goals right now is to minimize home-hacking on this. Another approach would be to purchase Plexicam’s Wave Shelf Kit, which is designed to solve this problem, but paying another $35 for a clear piece of plastic bugged me a little bit. Nonetheless, I do suspect that the Wave Shelf Kit plus the Plexicam Pro would create a pretty reasonable solution here, one that I’d be relatively happy with.
Conclusions
Of all of these approaches, (4) and (5) above are my favorite, with (4) likely being the winner (for now). I’m going to give the Plexicam a day in actual operations before deciding for sure, but I think it’s quite likely I’ll end up with the Wall-E configuration
Postscript: To Err is Human, to Change One’s Mind is Divine
So I gave the Plexicam a few days to grow on me, but in the process I also changed it so the ‘long’ part (which was supposed to be flat and have the camera on it) is now the vertical part, and the short part is horizontal. This required drilling a hole in the short part to accommodate a standard 1/4x20 camera mounting screw.
While I was at it, and using a heat gun carefully, I managed to bend the plastic to have it angle up:
And now, honestly? I kinda like it, and I think the Plexicam ends up being the winner. For now. Don’t get cocky, Plexicam.
