Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Webcams aren't good enough

reincubate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 610 posts

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#81

Post by feet »

dewey wrote: post #73
davidmurdoch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such things.

Laptop "lids" are a lot thinner than your average phone, they might be able to use a plateau like at the back of the phones to house it but I'd guess if there would be a simple solution that they could "just" do it would've happened already.

Okay? So change it?

Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#82

Post by pkamb »

lucb1e wrote: post #18
pkamb wrote: post #11

If I could I'd still be using my 480p external 2003 iSight camera through an increasingly ridiculous series of dongles: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/412516/external-is... Support though has been removed from Apple Silicon Macs :( Would be a good project for someone to hack support back in.

> If I could I'd still be using my 480p external 2003 iSight camera through an increasingly ridiculous series of dongles Why? 480p does not sound better than today's mediocre webcams, does it have some amazing light balance or face detection for focus or something? I would want to do this as well for shits and giggles, a 2003 webcam with 4 dongles being nearly on par with modern webcams is fun / hackery / a conversat…

Mainly for the external case design, which is still top-notch.

http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-isight

Great features too in the magnetic monitor attachment and the fancy aperture to close and turn off the camera.

The low resolution is somewhat appealing, in a retro way. If I'm going to be using a crappy external webcam it's cool that the image looks like an early 2000s PowerBook.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#83

Post by davidmurdoch »

gbanfalvi wrote: post #70
davidmurdoch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such things.

Not depthwise.

Neither are phones with great cameras... Which is why there are camera bumps.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#84

Post by feet »

nojito wrote: post #71
feet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop But yea, mic audio is always trash too

>What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop It will actually almost double the weight of the overall laptop if they added the same camera as they do on iPhone.

No post body was provided.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#85

Post by dewey »

feet wrote: post #81
dewey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop "lids" are a lot thinner than your average phone, they might be able to use a plateau like at the back of the phones to house it but I'd guess if there would be a simple solution that they could "just" do it would've happened already.

Okay? So change it? Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day to the next. Don't you think they would've done that instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution for the new Continuity camera?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#86

Post by the_only_law »

Look, my work laptop isn't shit, the hardware specs are actually pretty good, much better than my my personal laptop.

Yet for some reason my personal laptop has great camera, display is clear, adjusts well to lighting.

My working latptop camera on the other hand is utter garbage. It's grainy as hell and seemingly randomly radically changes the exposure making me go from vampire in the shadows to a divine, blinding glow I have and ISDN H.320 videophone that captures in 480i and still displays better, though the camera is much more significant than a tiny webcam and can manually adjust setting which for reason isn't an option for many laptop webcams.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#87

Post by jsdwarf »

feet wrote: post #19
navanchauhan wrote: post #12

You can use you phone's camera as a webcam with Reincubate's Camo App. This required a wired connection iirc. You can also use OBS Studio along with a virtual camera plugin to use any device which can output directly to your computer. But most of these solutions do not work on Safari or FaceTime unless you manually modify the app. Now, Apple is going to soon introduce their "It Just Works" solution with the next rele…

Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop But yea, mic audio is always trash too

Internal cams in laptops are considered commodities by the laptop manufacturers: they need to put any HD webcam in their product or no customer will buy it, but nobody picks a laptop model just because it has an excellent webcam.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#88

Post by davidmurdoch »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
davidmurdoch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such things.

Laptop screens are much thinner than phones are thick so a phone actually has more space for the camera in the dimension that is most restricted.

Phones have camera bumps. And screens could be thicker where needed.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#90

Post by feet »

dewey wrote: post #85
feet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay? So change it? Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day to the next. Don't you think they would've done that instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution for the new Continuity camera?

No, I definitely don't expect apple to make rational design choices at this point

Exhibit A, this thread

They've been shifting design choices in a direction for years and this is what came of it. They could have made other choices but did not

Post reply on HN