Selecting a camera for your rig

You are lining up a playfield shot, the lighting looks fine in person, and the stream preview seems acceptable until the ball starts moving. Suddenly the ball looks jagged or slightly oval. Fast shots smear. The score flickers or tears. Nothing is technically broken, but the result feels off in a way viewers notice immediately.

This is a common pinball streaming problem, and it is not caused by bitrate, OBS settings, or capture cards. It is almost always the camera.

I ran into this myself after watching a lot of pinball streams and then trying to build my own rig using what was recommended online. I ended up with the same issues I had been noticing as a viewer. The fix was straightforward once I stopped trying to tune around it. For fast moving objects like a pinball, you need the right kind of sensor.

Most off the shelf cameras use rolling shutter sensors. They are fine for people, desks, and static scenes. They struggle with fast motion under harsh lighting. The sensor reads the image line by line instead of all at once, so moving objects distort. That is where the odd shapes and jitter come from.

A global shutter sensor captures the entire frame at the same moment. No partial refresh. No smear from motion. That single difference is what makes a pinball look like a ball again.

I tried a lot of off the shelf options before accepting this. Consumer webcams. Action cameras. Industrial cameras. Even some global shutter cameras that looked promising on paper. I have a box of cameras that cost several thousand dollars sitting now unused, and I suspect many streamers do too.

The common problems were predictable. Features I did not need like batteries, microphones, onboard processing, and vendor utilities. Awkward shapes that were hard to mount cleanly. High prices for capabilities that did not improve a pinball stream. Or cameras that claimed high frame rates but relied on interpolation instead of real capture.

Once I stopped trying to force a general purpose camera into a very specific job, the path became clearer. Start from the actual requirements of a pinball stream.

• Fast motion without distortion
• Stable exposure under LEDs and mixed lighting
• Predictable behavior across Windows, macOS, and Linux
• No drivers, no utilities, no hidden processing
• Simple mounting that stays put once aligned

That thinking led directly to building purpose-built cameras instead of adapting existing ones.

The PARAFLIP playfield camera is designed for the hardest job in the rig. Tracking a fast steel ball across reflective surfaces under aggressive lighting. A global shutter sensor freezes motion cleanly at 1080p60, and the tighter lens geometry keeps the playfield framed naturally without edge distortion. It behaves like a camera should. Plug it in, set exposure if needed, and stop fighting it.

You can see the playfield camera here: 

For score displays, the requirements are different. Older EMs and solid state machines are forgiving, but modern machines introduce new problems. Bright LEDs. Fast refresh. LCD panels. Even machines like Banzai Run where it needs to capture a second playfield!

The PARAFLIP score camera exists to do exactly one job. Deliver a clean, readable score feed at 60fps without flicker, tearing, or partial refresh artifacts. The wide field of view makes alignment forgiving, and the global shutter ensures the display is captured consistently regardless of how the machine refreshes its output.

You can see the score camera here: PARAFLIP Global Shutter 1080p60 Score Camera

Both cameras use standard UVC. No drivers. No vendor software. They show up like cameras should and integrate cleanly with capture cards, docks, or directly into a PARAFLIP Parabox. The enclosure and mounting are intentionally boring. Once you frame the shot, it stays framed.

The player camera is intentionally simpler. Showing the person behind the game does not require a global shutter. It requires stable framing, reasonable color, and predictable behavior. A straightforward 1080p30 rolling shutter camera does that job well without adding cost or complexity where it does not help.

You can find it here: PARAFLIP 1080p30 Player Camera

All three cameras allow basic controls like exposure time, but they ship tuned for arcade environments. The parabox has a few additional presets for common environments to help too. The goal is not endless tweaking. It is repeatable results across different machines and locations.

If you are using a Parabox, these cameras are part of a closed ecosystem by design. That is how we keep setup time low and behavior predictable. If you are bringing your own capture cards or building a custom rig, there are other good cameras out there. Just be cautious with specs that look impressive but rely on interpolation or heavy onboard processing.

Pinball streaming is full of small technical choices that compound. The camera is one of the biggest. Once you stop trying to make the wrong tool behave, everything downstream gets easier.

Good rigs are not about chasing features. They are about choosing components that do their job reliably and then getting out of the way.