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!
Yes, they have. The front-facing camera in my Surface Book is of a much higher standard than most -- better than most separate webcams in my experience!
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.
I actually really enjoy the crappy camera in my 2020 Air. I work out of my garage which is pretty far away from the wireless router. Absent of running Ethernet through the walls or using a non-ideal mesh and halving the speed, there’s no easy way to get really good internet in there currently.
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’ve considered it - my first approach is actually going to try to run internet over the cat 3 cables (phone lines) in my house into a dedicated 5ghz router much closer to the garage first though. The theoretical 100/10 that should yield should be enough for video calls as long as the connection isn’t shared.
Anytime I looked at equipment for anything besides powerline or regular ethernet the prices were too damn high. There's a ton of cable company cable (standard name escapes me aside from"300ohm") that I looked at the cost of reusing for networking and it was a lot more than just slapping on powerline.
My favourite tip for low bandwidth connections (on Zoom at least) is the “stop incoming video” option which can be enabled in settings, and then turned on individually during a call from the view menu. It stops the streaming of everyone else’s video to you. Great if stuff is cutting out or screen shares aren’t updating well.
I wish Teams and Google Meet/Hangouts/whatever it’s called this week had this feature.
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!)
2. The hinges on laptop displays are typically only tuned for the weight of the lid. Added weight on the lid (especially the weight of a phone) could damage it over time.
Apple has all the hardware, firmware and software to make the webcam excellent. The fact they haven’t done that is a bit suspicious given that a ”noisy, low-resolution, unprocessed” camera is ideal for low bandwidth machine learning.
Downscaling video to be noisy low-resolution and effectively unprocessed is a trivial computation task. No need to have low-resolution cameras to get that - if you really want that.
Are you implying that it’s easy for computers to take the average color of 25 pixels and make one 5x5 pixel that color? Then drop a random set of frames/pixels?
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.
Last I checked, image resizing was anything but trivial. I get your point, but if you were optimizing for low energy consumption, you’d want to skip that downscaling because dropping every nth pixel actually removes data; meanwhile convolution operations are slow and cannot be done in-place i.e. without making it obvious what is happening.
For recording and viewing live content on a 14.5±1.5 inch screen, 1080p is good enough. My main concern would be frame rate. A smooth 1080p60 stream is better than a choppy one at 4K30. And such a camera is not too expensive or difficult to house under a thin chassis as Framework itself has demonstrated.
More importent elements to focus on would be good low-light detection & compensation as well as accurate color processing and low-latency audiovisual synchronization.
The clip is an ugly solution, but still it seems better than any other I could think of off the top of my head:
- 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.
Mostly by going with 5MP webcams in about 1mm thicker displays and wider bezels. Slightly pricier and uglier.
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.
By all means make them better but I wouldn’t trade off screen real estate, price, or basically anything else for a better built in webcam. I simply don’t care enough about my image quality on Zoom, and for anything more important than that I’ll be using an external solution anyway.
Tbh its a really jarring camera, even when I don't care about quality. I got a work Mac (2019 Intel), coming from a relatively mid range windows work laptop, and after my first meeting I spent at least half an hour googling for software bugs before it occurred to me that a $3000 laptop could have a camera that bad. The idea that I should also have a whole separate iphone to not look like 2010, or I guess 2017ish now that it's 1080, is actually baffling to me.
(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
After COVID started I was begrudgingly pulled into video conferences (before we did audio only and it was fine), so I picked up an old $3 webcam at the thrift store. They can see my face, that's all that matters.
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
This really is quite funny. I'm calling it now: that mount is going to cost you as much as a decent 3rd party webcam.
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!"
It wasn’t a mistake it was a strategic cost benefit analysis. Many people myself included don’t even use the webcam at all and would rather keep it blocked with a sticker most of the time. If most people statistically don’t use webcam on their MacBook why would it make sense to increase the price to have it? The few times I opened FaceTime app on the MacBook 2020 it looked fine to me anyways. I certainly wouldn’t like paying say an extra $100 for a better webcam I don’t even use.
This article sounds like it's written by a kid crying because he didn't get the extra candy he demanded.
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.
I love how this is exactly the kind of functionality the armchair designers would suggest (‘Apple would rather have you pay for a better camera when you already own one!’), but once again it’s not good enough.
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.
1920x1080 isn't terrible for a webcam (something you typically use for video calls where the feed is often not nearly at that resolution). It's not the resolution that could use improvement, but the overall video quality.
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.
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.
42 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] threadI'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 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. 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
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.
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.
(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
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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.