The Raspberry Pi makes a great USB webcam for $100

BRANK

There are many Raspberry Pi projects where I spend a few hours (or dozens of hours) building something with a Pi, and realize at the end that not only could I have purchased an off-the-shelf product to do the same thing for half the component cost, but it would work better too.But this is not one of those projects:The Raspberry Pi and its HQ camera make a surprisingly potent webcam, and if you want to cover the basics, and rival the image quality of all but the highest-end dedicated webcams, you can do it for under $100.Above is a single frame from a recording I did with the HQ Camera on my Raspberry Pi Zero W connected as a standard USB webcam using the Camera app on Windows 10 on my Dell laptop.That particular Dell laptop is the infamous XPS model with a 'nose cam'—a camera placed in the most unfortunate location: under the screen, so it looks straight up your nostrils at a low angle:Dell fixed the camera position in newer XPS laptops, but most laptops still have a pretty poor excu…