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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The front facing camera is seriously neglected.

They keep on adding more powerful/fancy cameras to the rear that people likely under-use in the common case, while the front camera that is commonly used for work, video conferencing, selfies, etc remains on the wrong edge and is under-powered. It is almost farcical with the new keyboard setting the top to the non-camera edge.

The front facing camera should be the premiere camera on the iPad, and should exist on the top and side, with triple microphone array (top, left, and right). Scrap two of the rear cameras to offset the cost.

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I think you are misjudging the "common case".

The front camera is 7MP (close to 4K) and records 1080p. I don't know of any videoconferencing software that uses more than 1080p, and there's always massive compression applied anyways which would defeat image improvements. The quality is more than enough.

There's also very little practical issue with it being on the side when in landscape mode. It just means that your eyes appear to be looking sideways rather than downwards (arguably an improvement, as eyelids don't move down -- much closer to how people actually look in an in-person meeting when not looking directly at you) and that your head is about 10% off-center. So a non-issue. I've never seen anybody even notice it in a conference call, much less complain.

Finally who is taking selfies with their iPad? That's what phones are for. It's too big to hold with one hand.

The common use case for cameras in the iPad Pro is actually the rear camera. iPads are being increasingly used as professional tools in shooting production-quality video as well as all sorts of other commercial applications.

So I think the balance is quite right.

There is a lot more to quality than megapixels. What I care about for the front-facing camera is the sensor size and lens aperture. I want more light hitting the sensor for cleaner images.

I've had to do meetings and interviews using the front-facing camera in environments where I don't have control over the lighting and the results were not great.

There is a dramatic difference in how flattering the angle of a photo is. Portraits should always be taken minimally at eye level, never below. Having the camera any lower makes people look uglier on video or selfies.

The Dell XPS series is awful for this; the camera is mounted below the screen, I guess to reduce the top bezel? It makes you look atrocious.

The newer models have fixed this, putting the webcam up top where it belongs!

Ah, good to know. I'll be slumming it with the 9570 for some time yet, I expect, so I'll probably just pick up a clip-on webcam if it bugs me too much.

Fixed in 2019

Just wait until you try the front facing camera on a MacBook (in my case, the Air from 2019). It's so horrible compared to any recent iDevice from the last years. I don't understand why they don't improve them to match the mobile quality at least.

It would be nice if they improved it, but I think they have their priority right at least... people are taking a lot of actual photographs with their phone selfie camera while the computer camera is mostly for video conferencing.

This might shed some light as to why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BLgS7m0W94

tl;dr: phone webcams have DMA, laptop webcams are using USB.

This seems like a dubious explanation; you can get quite high-quality external webcams that use USB 2.0.

I'd say a more likely (and harder to fix) explanation is that the phone ones can be deeper; laptop ones have to be very slim to fit.

It could just be a question of pricing. Maybe high quality phone cameras are available for very cheap, while USB 2.0 cameras with good image quality are not available for cheap from any vendors. There might not be any rational reason why this is beyond offer and demand.

Exactly. You want thinner bezel, slimmer Screen, and the trade off is simply the camera. Unfortunately there doesn't seems to be enough interest in it for Apple to innovate.

They could put a notch into the Macbook screen. /s

DO NOT GIVE TIM COOK IDEAS.

I guess Apple would be in a unique position here to use their experience from mobile to make a better integrated webcam in their computers as well, without most of those limitations.

good thin cameras are hard to make. phones are much thicker than your display.

I don't, but I see plenty of people who shoot pictures with their iPads. If the best camera was on the front, what would they use for a viewfinder?

Also, I used to be 100% remote, and I WFH plenty, so I'm on videoconferences all the time. I do not perceive the need for insanely good cameras for this.

Selfies, maybe, perhaps Instagram influencers need super-high-res selfie photos and movies.

All that being said, maybe there are uses I haven't even imagined for an iPad that has a better front-facing camera than rear-facing camera. But for my current use cases... I would say not.

With the new keyboard attachment the front camera isn't even at the top of the iPad, it is on the left/right edges. That's a large oversight.

As to video conferencing, it depends on what you're doing. If you're presenting a meeting and are being projected onto a conference room's TV/projector, the quality matters.

My biggest pain point with the iPad camera has always been that it isn't aimed against your face:

  \    /  :-(
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It clearly isn't an oversight. When people hold their pad they predominately use it in portrait mode. When people use it with a keyboard, they want it in landscape mode. This is pretty universal.

And, guessing, I would imagine people use this sans keyboard >95% of the time. So they gear it for that. Or should they put two cameras on it?

I highly doubt Apple was oblivious to this, but there are always compromises.

As to quality, the quality of this camera is equivalent or better than the overwhelming majority of webcams. Maybe people are doing xxx streams or something, but for a corporate meeting this is about three tiers above the average.

Put it on the corner maybe?

I have never seen a person take a picture with an iPad using the rear camera.

What I want from the front camera is mostly good light sensitivity and color rendition. I don't need more than 1080p video on it though. It feels like it should be possible without making it very expensive. If it isn't possible, then for an iPad I'd sacrifice ALL the rear camera functionality for just a slightly better front cam, in a heartbeat.

in my experience it is very popular to do in older demographics.

I’ve also seen it a lot at large scientific conferences where people take pictures of slides. This can be easier to work with on an iPad because they are probably also taking notes on it, so the picture get integrated into the notes.

The front facing camera is also massively neglected for the MacBook Pro, which I use all the time (!) for video conferencing.

This frustrated me to no end. I'm pretty sure the newest MacBook Pros have the exact same camera on my previous 2011 MacBook Pro (and likely earlier). I don't care all that much about resolution...just make the image quality better and work better in low light.

I believe the older MacBook Pro has an iSight camera, while the newer one has a FaceTime HD one.

So it's hard to find tech-specs, but iSight was branding between 2005 and 2010. The branding changed in 2011 and forward to "FaceTime HD." At that time resolution did get bumped up to 720p, but since a camera's quality can depend on many other things like lens and sensor noise I hate to say for sure but I'm pretty sure 2011 and 2019 laptops all have the same camera. After getting a newer gen MacBook Pro and being instantly disappointed I went back to my 2011 and saw very similar performance and image quality.

In 2017 they did start shipping a 1080p camera on iMac Pros, but that hasn't made it to portables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight#Built-in_iSight

Yeah, they're not great in general :(

I agree. The software needs support for this too. I earnestly tried to use the iPad for a few weeks, and the placement of the camera was annoying (off center, angled up, no one looks good at this angle). But the software was the deal breaker. iOS and iPadOS disallow background camera use and there is no API to allow it except for FaceTime which does PiP in the corner when it’s backgrounded. Even side-by-side in the new iPadOS will disable the camera when you switch the input cursor to other app! Makes it impossible to review or take notes during video calls or look at reference materials.

This ^

I wish there was a way to take notes on my iPad and join the call from my iPad. This it the main thing that keeps me from making the leap 100%.

I've not tried it but wouldn't split-screen (or whatever Apple calls it) do the trick?

Kind of, it cuts video off - but audio works just fine.

It seems like even a minor upgrade for the front camera would be fairly low cost to do. I wonder if it wasn't just effectively forgotten about.

I'm not sure who is taking selfies with an iPad, and videoconferencing has lots of quality concerns from compression and bandwidth issues that make camera quality kind of irrelevant.

If anything, I think videoconferencing really needs to move towards more abstracted forms of interaction instead of trying to accomplish crystal clear video. Evidently, remote classrooms are finding it easier to do lectures via Minecraft than Zoom or Skype.

With the kinds of advances in deepfakes and realistic looking face rendering we're getting, there isn't as much reason to be sending that much data over the network. You'd need a camera to capture things like writing on a markerboard, but just for conferencing and getting body language pseudo-MoCap would do fine.

> lots of quality concerns from compression and bandwidth issues that make camera quality kind of irrelevant

Better quality (lower noise) video reduces compression artefacts (or alternatively bandwidth requirements), because video codec doesn't need to waste bandwidth encoding all that high entropy noise.

Agreed. Even in television production, audio quality is seen as the most important part of the medium. If you lose video, the audience is not going to miss as much as if they lost audio (in most cases). This is even more true for conferencing. Of course, we didn't even have video in conferencing for the longest time.

They only need it to be optimized for close range in most use cases. I wouldn’t say is neglected

Exactly. I've had iPads now since the 2nd model, and have used front camera about 2% of the time, and the rear about 98% of the time (great for snapping whiteboards). But, truly, I don't use the cameras much at all, and would prefer to not have fancy cameras on an iPad. The phone is where the fancy cameras should be. And, I also carry a 'pocket' camera with far better close-ups, better video, and more storage and effects which I don't use as much, but is indispensable when it is.

The phone already is where the fancy camera is. The iPad back camera is far worse than the iPhone's cameras.

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