Monocle Fixes Webcam Farsightedness

[Vik Oliver] came up with a webcam focus fix that is so quick and simple we never would have thought of it. He received the webcam as a gift and mounted on an articulated lamp so that it could easily be positioned around his projects. The problem is the camera lacks a focus adjustment so the close-up shots were blurry.

In what we consider a eureka moment, he sourced a pair of dollar store reading glasses to fix the optics. The glasses came with their own mounting bracket. He clipped them in half and wrapped the wire ear support around the camera body. Great hacks don’t have to be complicated, and we need to do a better job of looking at the dollar store for project parts!

36 thoughts on “Monocle Fixes Webcam Farsightedness

  1. That’s a sweet looking webcam.
    I sat there for a full 2 minutes going “Where’s the webcam, I want to see it”
    Then realised that that’s not a diving mask, that’s the webcam >.>

  2. Eureka moment is good, in that this is almost as old as the formula for buoyancy, I’ve seen the reading glasses trick many times before now, although it is possible he thought of it independently of course, I think we all had things we cleverly figured out only to find we weren’t the first.
    But I’m sure intructables.com for instance has tons of examples of the same idea.

  3. I’ve been using my old broken Polaroid sunglasses (Non-Glass) for my webcam filters – helps remove the glare from those dorm windows – now if I can only find a filter to cut though the steam.

    – Porky

  4. I’ll take pictures and post this somewhere sometime, but I did something similar. I had an old gooseneck lamp, a cheap webcam and a LED-based “tap light”. I wanted a way to mount a webcam so I could point it at anything I wanted without having to hold it in place and, preferably, toss a little light on the situation. I removed the “lamp guts”, disassembled the webcam and the tap light, strung the USB cable through the neck of the lamp* and mounted the tap light and webcam where the lamp’s reflector used to be.

    The exposed lens assembly allows me to adjust focus easily, and the light keeps the scenes from the relatively poor-quality camera brightly lit.

    * this is trickier than you might think. The cable was just barely small enough to fit in the center of the gooseneck, and the plug at the end was no help… Think this step through carefully.

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