Apple, stop this nonsense and just put a decent camera in your laptops
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is the sort of product that I would've expected Apple to put out just around when they introduced the touchbar and removed every port off their laptops. They know their laptop camera is crap, but rather than fixing it, they've decided to build an entirely new, overpriced dongle to solve the problem they themselves created. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. "You can use your phone as your webcam!".... ok, now what happens when I'm on a meeting and need to look at my phone? "Well what we've got another dongle that projects your Apple Watch onto your macbook so you can use it as a phone!"
I'm a lover of https://notebookcheck.net/ & they have really really evolved some very good scientific tests. I can't think of the last time I saw them say a laptop camera was anything but poor.
My previous everyday-carry laptop, a Dell Venue 11 Pro, a 2-in-1 tablet- had a front-facing 8MP shooter and a 2MP selfie camera. At one point both were indeed available to me in Linux, but I think the 8MP disappeared at some point, somehow. I'd be interested to see if that was any good- the mere fact that it had two cameras is a sign that they kind of gave some kind of a crap, that maybe perhaps the (non-video-conferencing) camera might actually have been somewhat passable. Probably not!
As you've found, though, I suspect that this is something which is mainly available in 2in1 devices. I suspect this is because the screen (or "clipboard") can be much thicker than is considered "sexy" or "acceptable" in traditional laptops. With thickness more akin to a phone, a camera module more akin to a phone's can be installed. I suspect that most laptop vendors aren't willing to trade screen thickness for webcam quality.
That is exactly why, and physics simply gets in the way if one isn’t willing to make that trade.
(I'm not really picking on your comment per say, I get your sentiment too)
Edit: also, to be fair to apple, it's the only real hardware complaint I have, despite being overall negative on the OS the hardware is otherwise great, which is why it's such an unexpected dissonance
In a lot of the comparisons posted to twitter where they're saying the Apple Studio Display webcam is "terrible", I couldn't even tell the difference
1. High quality camera, far better than most laptop cams. 3 lenses and a highly mature image processing software stack.
2. Environmentally friendly. All resource usage & pollution associated with manufacturing another high quality camera disappear.
3. Economical. You don't have to pay for a higher quality camera to be manufactured and installed in every macbook.
Cons:
1. Looks/seems silly
Ok?
2. Need to keep track of mount, one more thing to forget or lose, and possibly have to replace. Cost of having one for each of home, office, and travel bag, if that's your typical solution for reliable access to small easily misplaced accessories.
3. Need to futz around setting up mount and phone every time you want to web cam, assuming you use your phone for other things in between, and don't plan on having the mount attached to your MacBook all the time.
3. Can't use phone while web camming with mounted phone.
4. Can't use phone to cam on days you can't find your phone, or other corner cases: left it somewhere, phone battery is low (ok you can add sum extra futz for a charging cord), ...
5. Non-ergonomic and possibly physically unreliable for moving or tight situations, like when in a vehicle or a cramped plane seat.
6. Looks/seems silly. Unprofessional. Cluttery. (Worth putting in here twice!)
If apple is stopping people from zooming in (on a laptop!) from an airline seat, then Godspeed to whatever they want to do.
2. Environmentally unfriendly plastic accessories and power consumption
3. The plastic strap will probably cost more than the built-in camera would
More importent elements to focus on would be good low-light detection & compensation as well as accurate color processing and low-latency audiovisual synchronization.
- Wait to out until someone invents a unique light capture system in the future which meets expectations.
- Shoot the same image multiple times with multiple cameras and use ML to create a composite image of good quality.
- Shoot different quadrants with multiple cameras and stitch them together.
- Add a bump at the top edge of the screen to get the depth needed for multiple lenses and then a notch under the trackpad for the bump to fit into. The fact they have the huge bump on the iPhone Pro does indicate they are willing to compromise a bit on form factor for function and a notched trackpad would match them notched screen.
- Add a fragile spring loaded bump which pops out as the screen is opened.
- Add a fragile mechanical bump that needs to be lifted into place to enable the webcam.
- Put wide angle cameras in the bottom case for a reverse desktop view.
- Instead of an external clip bump the Apple up to the top edge for a magnetic QI charger built into the back of the screen (current solution without needing to carry a clip).
- Make the screen thicker and use the unused space for additional light weight battery capacity and/or some sort of ePaper scribble surface.
I hope they gather enough data from this clip experiment to justify experimenting with a compromise solution.
The hiccup of the latest Studio Display seems to imply there is a lack of collaboration with the device camera teams. Every year I hope Apple steps up as an otherwise excellent camera company and jacks up the price even more for better sensors across the board.
You can’t fit a good camera in a laptop screen, because it’s not thick enough. It doesn’t fit! Cameras need depth and that’s not available in a 1 mm lid. And Apple isn’t going to make the lid thicker just to fit a better camera. To make it as good as the iPhone camera, the lid would have to be as thick as an iPhone, including the camera bump, which is ridiculous.
Cameras on phones and cameras on laptops/PCs are radically different devices. You can't just take a phone camera and slap it onto a PC. The other side of this is that cameras on PCs just suck in general.
They're working around a massive achilles heel in the flow: Cameras in USB are limited to USB2 Full Speed. Somewhere around 1080p60 is where the practical limit kicks in, at about 30-80Mbit/s.
That's enough for H.264 baseline encoding at 1080p60 easily. Problem: Realtime H264 and HEVC encoders are power hungry, big, and bulky. Elgato's game capture hardware has a streaming delay of up to 1-2s for "real time" 1080p USB capture, typically ranging in the 200-500ms delay times. Those devices get hot, cost $$$ ($180) and are purpose built. There's no guesswork as to why a "pro" streamer setup nowadays consists of a higher end DSLR or HDMI camera on a capture card: It's simply better: There's more bandwidth dedicated to it, there's more hardware doing the compression, and there's more glass to work with.
Now, Phones (At least, a lot of Android phones) use a totally different interface, called MIPI CSI or the Mobile Industry Platform Interface Camera Serial Interface (say that a bunch of times fast), which defines a high speed (2-8 lane) non-USB interface. Part of the issue is that these standards are licensed. IANAL, but I do know that the MIPI alliance would not like it if Apple just slapped their camera stack right onto their SoC for laptops and later desktops. There's actually nothing stopping them from shoveling MIPI CSI over USB3 and writing a driver on the other side that consumes the video stream. Heck, you'd get RAW 10-bit color out of your laptop camera. The issue comes when, again, licensing kicks in.
*However*, I will give that there is a further problem that Apple is facing: To do this, they'd have to make their laptops thicker. In the iPhone 13, the triple-camera setup is at least 7mm thick, which on their new Air model would leave only 4mm for... The rest of the machine. Thick lids are, in Apple's design language, the mark of the "old" and relegated to the non-Apple ecosystem. M1 macbook pros had a spat where they would spontaneously shatter the LCD due to inconsistent thermal expansion, mostly because of the lack of rigidity in the overall frame.
If you need to shoot 4K for something, there are plenty of options out there. But I think a laptop camera would be better off advancing the current standard in terms of video quality than in resolution.
I use it to take video calls instead of my much nicer Logitech cam on my desktop since the crappy camera works just fine on the weak signal.
I wish Teams and Google Meet/Hangouts/whatever it’s called this week had this feature.
1. 1080p is plenty for videoconferencing. We're not filming a movie, are we?
2. you're given the option to use a far more competent camera if you'd like
3. provided you don't absolutely _need_ the clamp for this to work (I don't know), you could position the camera in a much better place than in the "up your nose" position.
This is a nice feature. Why is that dude crying?
No, apple, the company with the worst voice assistant (who does most of the work on-device for privacy reasons), must want to collect our (low motion single vantage point image) data for some nefarious reason.