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The original Apple FireWire webcam was very good, with a large, motorized lens. Despite boasting higher resolution, I doubt many modern webcams are as good, es
by madengr 6y ago
The original Apple FireWire webcam was very good, with a large, motorized lens. Despite boasting higher resolution, I doubt many modern webcams are as good, especially integrated ones.
- jjoonathan 6y agoYou can still judge the macbook cameras by looking at the images they deliver. They're bad, really bad. I suspect that apple's laptop guru / team moved to iPhone and never got backfilled, leaving the macbooks with budget flat cameras from 2007 or something.
- bserge 6y agoHigh quality cameras have been around since ~2015 even on midrange smartphones. Why can't laptops get one of those? Is there a supply issue?
- jjoonathan 6y agoI doubt there's a good reason. That's why I'm considering bad reasons like "it fell through bureaucratic floor-cracks."
- EricE 6y agoCompare the thickness of the lid of your laptop to that of your phone. There is your answer - Physics is a harsh mistress!
- Domenic_S 6y agoI had that camera. It was better than its contemporaries, but definitely not as good as even the mediocre built-in cameras today. Here's an article with screenshots: https://www.macworld.com/article/3018431/in-praise-of-the-glorious-wildly-over-engineered-isight-webcam.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3018431/in-praise-of-the-gl...
- jonpurdy 6y agoHow awesome would an updated iSight be today? You could fit an APC-C sized sensor (1.6x crop DSLR) with a 22mm f/2 pancake lens for some insane bokeh. Probably at around the $300 price point. Sure would be easier than hooking a "clean HDMI" DSLR or mirrorless into a HDMI input/USB adaptor...
- geerlingguy 6y agoEspecially if the camera could compress the stream in-body so you don't have to blow up your CPU/GPU to get a good 60fps HD video signal like you do using a mirrorless/DSLR.
- numpad0 6y agoIMO YMMV etc but wide lens distortion can drag down what people would call “image quality”. 50 or 85 would work better for portraits if you can afford the distance.