MacBook Air i3 2020 - Awful webcam!?

[mrboult]

Good day all,

I purchased a refurbished '2020 Core i3 MacBook air Retina' a couple months back and I wanted to ask other owners about their webcam quality. Mine sucks, even in good light it looks like a grainy camera from 10+ years ago (And I'm really not exaggerating here)

MY GF's 2013 MacBook Air 13 is considerably better side by side in the same room/conditions. Can any camera on an apple product in 2020 really be this bad? It's so grainy

 

[CheesePuff]

Tons of threads and complaining about this already on this forum and every other Mac related forum in existence. Yes, the web cam "sucks", is 720p, and the sensor change from earlier models to the ones used in the 2018+ models are deemed to be sightly worse.

The M1 MBA uses the same sensor but has improved image handling and thus slightly better quality thanks to the work done by by the M1.

 

[MBAir2010]

Some have purchased a usb camera to improve the picture quality.
how is the Macbook air besides the 2010 camera?

 

[mrboult]

Ah - I did a search, but perhaps my wording wasn’t great. Thanks for the response! Just needed to know if I had a problem I should send it back for. .

other than that the MacBook is great. Though I’m no power user.

cheers

 

[CheesePuff]

Ah - I did a search, but perhaps my wording wasn’t great. Thanks for the response! Just needed to know if I had a problem I should send it back for. .

other than that the MacBook is great. Though I’m no power user.

cheers

Here's one that's still on the front page: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mba-2020-facetime-camera-is-abhorrent.2241960/ and there is a good explanation in there too about why it may be perceived as the older MBA looking better... the older model did not have a Retina screen which has 4x the pixels as the non-Retina, so it will look more grainy trying to fill the same screen size with the same webcam resolution on one vs the other

 

[xboxbml]

Blows my mind why they would put such a crappy camera in their latest and greatest advancement in mobile computing... Put in a 1080+ and make it auto/adjustable by the user for bandwidth availability.

 

[CheesePuff]

Blows my mind why they would put such a crappy camera in their latest and greatest advancement in mobile computing... Put in a 1080+ and make it auto/adjustable by the user for bandwidth availability.

Large sensors are too thick for how thin their displays are on the MacBook lineups. The iPhone is much thicker.

 

[xboxbml]

Large sensors are too thick for how thin their displays are on the MacBook lineups. The iPhone is much thicker.

Pretty sure other manufacturers are using better cameras in theirs.. can't be that much thicker.. I'd give up a mm or two if that's what it took..

 

[mrboult]

Well thanks for the replies and information. I’ve now seen the other thread. It does seem like an odd choice, and the fact that in 2020 (the year of zoom calls) they updated the line without notable improvement. . . Well it’s a joke.

 

[CheesePuff]

Pretty sure other manufacturers are using better cameras in theirs.. can't be that much thicker.. I'd give up a mm or two if that's what it took..

Thats what most people think but look into it.. the Dell XPS has a worse camera, and models that do have a 1080p camera either have it placed down at the keyboard (which is a terrible angle) or are is in a very thick design. It's not just 1 or 2 mm

 

[MBAir2010]

The Dell XPS 2019 13“ camera i thought was very good, even video from Costa Rica was clear and sounded real. That was a great notebook i wish i could hackintosh!
also,the design of these 2020 macbook airs were before 2020, video and camera chatting were not in demand as this year unexpectedly was.

 

[xboxbml]

The Dell XPS 2019 13“ camera i thought was very good, even video from Costa Rica was clear and sounded real. That was a great notebook i wish i could hackintosh!
also,the design of these 2020 macbook airs were before 2020, video and camera chatting were not in demand as this year unexpectedly was.

Yeah, well regardless, it should already have had a better one...

 

[MBAir2010]

Yeah, well regardless, it should already have had a better one...

i will let them know