iSight Camera vs. FaceTime HD Camera.

[hypebeast]

With the new MacBook Pro's, they are advertising the camera as a FaceTime HD camera. But the old one's have iSight Cameras. I was wondering what the differences were? Is the FaceTime HD Camera better than the old iSights? Or is it just a rebranding of the same camera? I know it is thinner, but what advantages come from that?

 

[iPadThai]

With the new MacBook Pro's, they are advertising the camera as a FaceTime HD camera. But the old one's have iSight Cameras. I was wondering what the differences were? Is the FaceTime HD Camera better than the old iSights? Or is it just a rebranding of the same camera? I know it is thinner, but what advantages come from that?

I believe it is the new processors that enable these features without any sort of compromise in general performance when using HD. Built into the processor design is intel's quicksync technology - which allows for video encoding/decoding in CPU rather than rely on GPU. In fact, some benchmarks already prove that it's substantially faster using quicksync than GPU encoding/decoding.

But I think you must be using the Intel HD3000 onboard gpu in order to utilize quicksync. I suppose the new facetime HD allows 720p compression on the fly with these new processors.

The current isight camera supports 1280x1024 I think natively.