Whats wrong with the new camera in the 2020 iMac 27" or iMac Pro? I use it all day for video conferencing, its a huge improvement in quality over previous generations and works just fine.
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MBA 2020 Facetime camera is abhorrent
- Thread starter kdw877
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Whats wrong with the new camera in the 2020 iMac 27" or iMac Pro? I use it all day for video conferencing, its a huge improvement in quality over previous generations and works just fine.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with the 1080p camera per se. However, I often need to move my C920 around depending on what I'm recording at the time. That is something you can't do with any integrated camera from any manufacturer.
We have both a 2017 MacBook Air and a 2020 Intel MacBook Air in our household, so I put them side by side on a single call (2020 on the left, 2017 on the right). I don't know whether you can tell from the photo taken with my phone, but the 2017 is clearly superior; the image from 2020 MBA (which shows up on the 2017's screen) is all muddy with loss of sharpness and compression artifacts. Please excuse the fact that I have obscured portions of my face to preserve a small amount of privacy - quaint notion, I know. Perhaps you can guess what I'm getting my spouse for Christmas 
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We have both a 2017 MacBook Air and a 2020 Intel MacBook Air in our household, so I put them side by side on a single call (2020 on the left, 2017 on the right). I don't know whether you can tell from the photo taken with my phone, but the 2017 is clearly superior; the image from 2020 MBA (which shows up on the 2017's screen) is all muddy with loss of sharpness and compression artifacts. Please excuse the fact that I have obscured portions of my face to preserve a small amount of privacy - quaint notion, I know. Perhaps you can guess what I'm getting my spouse for Christmas
I think the 2020 clearly looks much sharper and improved image then the 2017 in your photo...
Yes, that's the point.
The 2020 MBA has a clear edge in absolute pixel sharpness (as it should, with the Retina display), but the 2020 MBA is displaying video originating from the 2017 MBA's camera. The fuzziness around my face, glasses, hallway objects, etc on the laptop on the right is not caused by insufficient pixels on the 2017 MBA; there are more than enough pixels on the 2017 display, it's just that what it is receiving is poor quality video.
Actually, the Retina display shouldn't really even be much of a factor: both laptops have a 720p camera, which implies that the video generated is 1280 wide by 720 high in pixels. The Retina display has approximately twice the resolution in both dimensions (2560 x 1600), so every video pixel sent to it over the communication channel is going to be displayed as a 2x2 pixel block of identical pixel shading - the Retina display can't make up information (on sharpness) that isn't in the original video stream, it can only replicate pixels to map them to the larger pixel count display. The 2017 MBA screen resolution is 1440 x 900, so it maps the video stream 1:1 to its display more or less, depending on window size. The end result is that on either display there is either one pixel (2017) or four Retina pixels all of the same brightness and color that appear as one approximately equal sized "virtual pixel" on the 2020 display.
I bypass this problem by never Facetiming or Zooming. However, using an old Nokia VGA 0.3MP plug-in camera from the year 2000 on a thousand dollar 2020 laptop is extemely poor form from Apple. Decent cams cost a few dollars.
