Since it supports Center Stage, the camera is actually seeing an extremely wide field of view, and then cropping in to show a more normal view. This naturally means the resolution is going to suffer, and gone are any hopes of the optics being good enough to provide even the tiniest background separation. Even if they fix some ISP issue, the webcam quality seems unlikely to ever be good, but it might become acceptable.

It's trivial to find people complaining about the quality of center stage online[0], although it seems like reviewers were mostly wowed by the novelty of the feature, and not how it looks in day to day usage.

Apple doesn't want to talk about the resolution of Center Stage, but when zoomed all the way out... you're limited to 1080p30. It crops significantly into that 1080p image during normal use, so I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at an effective resolution of 480p or worse.

Given how much space they have on the monitor, and how much they're charging for the monitor, I wish they would have done something cool like having the Center Stage camera and a better quality normal camera. Center Stage is only useful when there are multiple people, or you can't stay still for some reason... and neither of those apply to 99% of Zoom calls I've seen in the past several years.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/nypvug/m1_ipad_pros_f...