Stack Overflow Question: webcam latency, does usb 3.0 make it better

Just noticed this over on Stack Overflow, wondering if anyone has experience here.

Currently im working on a computer vision system using a Ricoh Theta 360 camera. The camera livestreams the data to a computer over usb 2.0

I started a stopwatch online, aimed the camera lens at it and took a screenshot to compare the actual time passed with the time that the camera output showed and it has a difference of ~175ms.

I’ve read that the latency will be lower when using a camera with an usb 3.0 usb port but I don’t get the theory behind it. Since the current stream shows no lag or framedrops the usb 2.0 can obviously handle the data I assume. why would this be better with an usb 3.0 port?

I read this post on Reddit.

The two things I observed:

  1. Frame rate
  2. Uncompressed

The industrial camera mentioned had a frame rate of 230fps with uncompressed video. The receiver may take time to uncompress the video frame or the camera may take time to compress it

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