Is there any laptop with a good webcam ?
4 years ago, the WSJ made a video testing some laptop webcam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daqPLDDAntA). They all sucked. Do you know if it is still the case ?
Laptop cameras are terrible because they need to be super thin. Why? Because people like laptop lids that are super thin.
Some manufacturers sort of fixed that by placing the camera somewhere else. On the one hand, the camera is a bit better, on the other, placing the camera by the keyboard gives you permanent chin face.
Qualcomm laptops seem to have better processors for their terrible webcams at least, but they’re still webcams.
If you need a good webcam, you may need to buy an external one. You need to check reviews, but many USB webcams are excellent. Still won’t solve the problem of your video being compressed to shit by video conferencing software, but it’s a start!
Thank you. It is good to know that webcam is not important when picking a laptop for work. I will look at external ones.
Do be careful, the like 20–50€ USB webcams that you can usually find are absolute dogshit IME and probably blown away by any webcam on a good recent laptop (the one I have certainly is by the one on my MacBook and IIRC the laptop I had before also had a better camera). Personally I wouldn’t trust any of the ones I can see listed on amazon right now. A lot of times they have horrible autofocus, brightness adjustment, noise and so on even if the theoretical image resolution is advertised as 1080p for example. (Of course, you can always send it back but still.)
If you want actually good quality, get a real video camera that you can connect to a computer, or if possible use your phone back camera if it’s good enough (I know Macs can use the iPhone camera as a built in thing, not sure about other combinations of phone/computer).
I’m using an app to use my Android phone as a webcam, which works great (good low light performance!) provided I can stand it up somewhere above my laptop screen (finicky). You can accidentally knock it over. Might be worth considering if you don’t use the camera much - otherwise an external one will probably attach better and he more stable
My phone is way thinner than the laptop lid but the cameras front and back are better, even inscreen holepunch camera is better on a phone than any laptop
That must be a chunky laptop lid! It’s not just thickness, it’s also parts availability. Most laptops are super thin so the market for USB webcam daughterboards is optimised for shitty, thin laptop cameras.
There’s also post-processing: a webcam of the same shitty image sensor size can look a lot better if the raw data is processed better. That’s why many Qualcomm laptops look to have better webcams even though the camera quality is just as bad, they just use the skills they’ve gathered in the mobile space to process the image into a more pleasing image.
Great ! Thank you !
Nobody really uses the laptop webcam
Honestly wouldn’t mind one without an internal camera for work
Wut? I use mine for meeting with clients. It works great.
