New facetime camera right?

[Jhingha]

I just had a facetime chat with my dad (who just got his MBP 2011).

Altough I think his video quality is ever worse than a 10 dollar webcam.

I did checked the side and this model has Thunderbolt.

So how do I gonna check that he really has this 720P camera?

PS I still have the BETA version of Facetime on that 27inch mac. does the quality get limited maybe?

 

[SideStepSociety]

Ultimately, the quality of the video relies on the connection quality.

And whilst I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if the FaceTime beta was limited to a lower resolution.

 

[kappaknight]

If you're willing to spend a buck to get FaceTime 1.0 to test it out, I'd appreciate your results on what you find.

 

[Jhingha]

I,m willing to test that (as soon i get back from work).

The connection quality was super (same network).

I did test with Photobooth on the mbpa few minutes later and I didnt' really think feel like HD quality. im gonna do a few tests later.

 

[electronique]

NOt sure if this helps or not.

Ive downloaded Facetime on my iMac - Never used it before, but went to call my missus this afternoon. Didnt get through as she wasnt on WIFI.

But.. Just with Facetime open, i see myself. The image was terrible. It was like an old 0.3MP webcam...

Comparing it to my image when using Skype - NO comparison. The image of myself on Skype is absolutely perfect.

I cannot see when using the same hardware with the same lighting, two different apps give very different results.

 

[Nykwil]

This is how you know.

You take a picture in photobooth with your imac, and you take a picture in photobooth with the new macbook pro.


Compare sizes.

 

[mulo]

unless his dad has fiber optics he's most certainly limited by his upload bandwidth.

 

[benpatient]

oh don't be silly.

Just last night, I was streaming 720p videos from my mac pro to my new MBP, just to test my wifi speed and the MBP's decoding capability. One video ran fine on its own. Two ran fine simultaneously. Three started to skip frames.

This is over wifi, on a .g spec router that's over 3 years old.

If he was testing facetime over a local network (which is what he indicated), then I'm sorry but it's not a network issue.

I've been trying to get my 2011 MBP's "HD" camera to show me an actual un-modified stream, and I can't figure out how to do it. Photobooth crops it down to 3x4 and 640x480. If you have photobooth turned on, and then you turn on facetime, too, it squishes the photobooth image, because instead of cropping to 4x3, it starts showing the entire 16x9 video feed, but it is squished into the 4x3 photobooth box.

I'm thinking that photobooth isn't actually HD-compatible, and they're going to have to release a new version soon to address that. Maybe in a point release of OS X.

 

[Jhingha]

So, evaluation of some tests.
just one actually.

I skyped over LAN with him.
Movie quality was reasonble, maybe I just expected more.

And maybe did facetime looked crap on that 27inch iMac. because it as a True HD screen. I don't know.

I'll find out as soon I have my own Macbook Pro