Making USB webcams that fit into the bezel of a laptop screen means they are basically universally terrible. In part this is because there really aren't many "n

Making USB webcams that fit into the bezel of a laptop screen means they are basically universally terrible. In part this is because there really aren't many "native" USB imagers, almost all of the sensors are natively MIPI CSI devices, with a MIPI-USB interface that performs limited image processing and compression to present the UVC interface. Given the size/power/thermal constraints of a laptop bezel, there's very little you can do. If you compare laptop webcams to phones with similar size constraints on the sensor/optics but much more capable image processing units, phones do a much better job. Even if you have much more processing power available in a laptop CPU/GPU than a phone, once the camera feed has already been processed and heavily compressed there's nothing you can do to get that information back. Historically, PC processors didn't have a native MIPI interface, and laptop vendors wouldn't have accepted the costs of adding an additional image processor to the motherboard or the effort to standardize a new camera interface. The first PC processors to support MIPI may have been Intel's "Silvermont" mobile/embedded processors in 2013, but didn't come to Intel laptop SoCs until some "Skylake" models with IPU3 then became fully mainstream with IPU6. Now, direct-to-SoC MIPI plus on-SoC image processing unit is widely available. Additionally, in the intervening years MS broke any all-cameras-are-UVC assumptions by using MIPI cameras on Surface devices and thus getting the software interfaces ready.