A team of former Apple, Beats, and Uber employees are bringing a new 4K webcam to market that is being billed as “the first professional webcam.” Along with what looks like superior picture quality, the new device, named the Opal C1 includes a premium build, noise-canceling, beamforming microphones, plug-and-play macOS support via the exclusive Mac app, pro tools, and much more.
Opal is ready to shake up the Mac webcam market and while the device isn’t shipping just yet, limited beta preorders are happening now.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is one of the backers of the new company and he recently shared a look at a beta version of the hardware, including his take that “the quality is mind blowing…” following up with “Webcams, welcome to 2021.” (h/t Will Sigmon).
The Opal C1 looks very impressive with a 7.8mm Sony sensor that offers 4K 4056 x 3040 resolution, 60 fps, f1.8 with a six-element lens.
Opal says the C1 webcam offers 2.4x more light “than any other webcam” and “5x the resolution of a regular webcam.”
Other features include “MicMesh”:
an array of beamforming microphones that find and focus on the sound of your voice. And with intelligent noise cancellation, every ding, drop and dog bark is filtered out to get an audio experience that clearly speaks for itself.
The enclosure is made from “aero-grade aluminum” and inside the webcam as a custom Opal Trillium neural microchip that offers 4 trillion operations per second along with an Intel VPU chip.
Pro features include bokeh, touch up, and more fine-grained image controls for brightness, contrast, and white balance.
Coming from former Apple and Beats employees, no surprise, but wonderful to see that Opal includes beautiful native integration with Macs right out of the box. And it looks like Opal is almost solely focused on Mac users as the app is just for macOS.
Get access all the power of hardware on the Opal app, made exclusively for Mac.
Reservations are open now for the Opal C1 in white or black with a price tag of $300 – that is when you get invited to purchase during the limited beta period. You can sign up for that list here.
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