Originally published at: This 1080p webcam is the video upgrade your online meetings desperately needs | Boing Boing
…
Fuck that shit. Unless someone asks, my camera stays off.
15 Likes
Man, Madam Mrs the Ratel just bought a new MacBook, and the camera is still shitty. Not vouching for this one, per se, but if you use a MacBook or MacBook Air and do a lot of web conferencing, you basically need an external web cam, or people will think you’re teaching your class from 2006.
1 Like
Yeah Joanna Stern wrote about this Laptop Webcam Showdown: MacBook Air? Dell XPS? They’re Pretty Bad
Spoiler, phones kick everyone’s ass, and yes, you need a “real” external webcam if you want high quality.
1 Like
Is that some weird kind of paywall? I can’t find an article at that link, and I know wsj is mostly paywalled.
Does it stop working randomly and mostly just not function right?
Because what I really need is to dial down the quality of my video meetings.
2 Likes
So where are the pictures of a screen grab? Does it, like too many 1080p webcams, used a fish eye lens, distorting everything around the edges?
4 Likes
And there is zero manual override. I can’t stop my MBP’s camera from over exposing or adjust the white balance.
But I have zero confidence that a StackSocial discount webcam will be an improvement.
1 Like
There are common brands like Anker and Aukey on Amazon that do a decent job for less money anyway.
1 Like
Because the only way to convince your colleagues is to display each nostril hair distinctly!
3 Likes
Oh! Right. I just mentally screen out all images above a headline as ads.
The other thing is about what you’re doing: I usually have my meeting app on the laptop screen and my work on my larger second monitor, but my wife is presenting, so she has the deck she’s reading on her second monitor, so she needs a camera there to look at.
3 Likes
According to the specs, this camera’s field of view is horizontal 80 degrees, diagonal 95 degrees. That’s narrower than a fisheye view, but it’s also much wider than the ~65-degree view that’s suitable for a single person sitting in front of a webcam. While FoV specs are never very reliable, I doubt that this webcam will have much peripheral distortion. Still, there are better choices in this price range.
2 Likes
Just get a Logitech. You’re done, you have a good web camera.
I disagree. Unless it is a lecture or presentation situation where one person speaks and a crowd of people (I’d say >25) listen I do find it rude if someone keeps their cam off. Especially if they’re muted as well you never know whether you’re speaking to your colleagues or to a bunch of abandoned computers while their owners are off cooking dinner or walking the dog. Plus it’s much easier to interact with people when you can see them.
1 Like
Wow how did you ever survive with conference calls?
Unless I’m the focus of the meeting (and by that I mean someone needs to see my face) my camera stays off. Period. Nobody needs to see my ugly mug staring into the camera the majority of the time.
Why is this important? Can you keep track of a bunch of floating heads? What would you do if people aren’t paying attention? Shame them?
And in any event, if people aren’t paying attention maybe they don’t need to be there or maybe they just aren’t engaged enough. Forced surveillance won’t change any of that.
4 Likes
It’s all about thickness. It’s just not physically possible to put a better camera in a space as thin as a laptop screen - the depth available for the camera module limits the length of the lens, which limits the sensor size, which limits image quality.
Phones have a lot more thickness to work with. The only laptops with half-decent webcams put them in the hinge, which lets you have a bigger sensor at the cost of a worse angle that’s always looking up your nose.
3 Likes
And it doesn’t help that Apple’s mantra is to reduce thickness at all costs. Even if it means reducing overall usability – like the awful and much maligned butterfly keyboard, or getting rid of all ports aren’t USB-C all to shave millimeters off the laptop thickness. 720p webcams are good enough for most uses, and I don’t see Apple raising costs or spending engineering budget for any incremental improvements here.
4 Likes
Yeah, Joanna mentions that in her video – there are some physical limits we’re running into, so it might be unreasonable to expect super high quality video from any webcam physically embedded in a super thin device. Heck, even on smartphones, we have “camera bumps” now?
(She’s a great tech columnist, by the way, I recommend following her on Twitter. 
)
4 Likes
Yeah, agreed - resolution is not the thing that matters. You can have a full 1920x1080 webcam that still looks like a grainy/smeary mess if the sensor is too tiny to capture much light. Conversely, the old Firewire iSight - which is like 3" deep - produces a surprisingly nice image despite its 640x480 resolution.
Sensor size matters far more than resolution. (Similar thing for streaming video - I don’t really care how many pixels tall the image is, it will still look awful if it’s compressed down to a few megabits per second - but resolution is an easy-to-understand number that you can put on the spec sheet as a buzzword 
)
2 Likes
