The price wouldn’t be such a sticking point if it were top-notch in all respects.
On one hand, it definitely has the best tracking and autofocus I’ve seen, with the ability to track not just your head, but also zones, with presets like upper body, lower body and “headless” (which just creeps me out), and you can create custom zones. Not only does it track well in almost all respects, moving smoothly and naturally from one position to another, but the phase-detection autofocus doesn’t pulse like contrast-AF-based system found in many webcams. It would be nice to be able to set the interval it registers before it decides you’ve actually moved; the default seems just a hair too long before it thinks “OK, she’s moved and not just twitched.”
But while it’s better than before, the mic still isn’t great, even for a webcam, which tend to have meh mics; since the dual mics are omnidirectional, they pick up a lot of extraneous noise and the noise reduction overprocesses the sound in order to remove it.
And the Tiny 2 is good, but I think the Insta360 Link and Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra — both still relatively expensive at $300 — have better exposure (they both have larger sensors, 1/1.2 inch compared to Obsbot’s 1/1.5 inch), white balance and noise profiles. By default, it’s a little too contrasty, with slightly off skin tones, and though the low-light video isn’t noisy, it’s exacerbated by the contrast.
You can make manual adjustments in software, including setting shutter speed and ISO sensitivity independently, changing the contrast or setting a manual white balance, but none of those are good solutions in variable lighting and manual white balance just never works right.
These are places where webcams could really benefit from some AI — to recognize what tone it should be targeting, how to hit a specific user-requested white balance given multiple and changing light sources, when (and how) to shape the mic pickup range from uni- to omnidirectional and so on.
Like the Tiny 4K and some competitors, the Tiny 2 has gesture controls in addition to the voice control. But I find the voice control far more useful than gestures; I wave my hands around a lot while talking, which tends to result in things like unwanted and unexpected zooming in the middle of a rant.
Plus, I really wish the gimbal positioning were voice controllable. The virtual joystick you manipulate in software has a floaty movement, which results in either too small or sudden large jumps when you try to adjust it with the mouse. And you can’t lock an axis, which means that when you’re trying to pan you inevitably end up tilting.