One of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the rise of so-called telecommuting, i.e. exercising from home. Well, while not all companies do this, there are a few that require their employees to be logged into their webcams all the time. The problem? This is something that many computer manufacturers either don’t support or do very little about, making the retransmission quality really bad in a device that’s basically the most superfluous of all those that come standard.
This writer hates webcams built into laptops for several reasons. For example, we have the fact that sand are integrated into the frame of the screen from the computer. Honestly, we’ve long expected to see bezel-less laptops on their screens, not just for aesthetics, but for functionality as well. Moreover, the fact not being able to move the camera gives the worst viewing angles for video conferencing
Laptop webcams suck and you know it
Over the years, chips have grown in complexity, being able to add structures that previously occupied multiple chips into one. For example, those years when sound cards or network cards were sold separately are long gone. Which isn’t a bad thing if the product meets minimum acceptable performance specifications.
The problem with the many webcams built into laptops? It’s about putting them into service and seeing how the picture quality of broadcasts is lower than permitted in terms of image quality. Why does this happen? Let’s see:
- A webcam is nothing more than a digital camera and hence it converts what the image sensor captures into an ditto file through an encoding process.
- This process can have different quality levels that are reflected in the information that will be generated by the video file with which our PC will work.
- In other words, the quality of the image will depend on the rate at which the file is compressed for transmission over the Internet.
- The problem arises when we need to have the lowest possible latency and one way to achieve this is to reduce the transfer time, so that the information ends up being eliminated and with it the details.
Let’s not forget that any feeling of delay in a video call is perceived negatively by the end user, so in the end what matters is speed over image quality. However, in many cases this is not justifiable and one wonders if it is justifiable to integrate a webcam into a PC if the result is poor quality.
A section that will improve in the following years
Adding so-called image signal processors, or ISPs, already available in mobile phones, will be one of the first steps in improving the image quality of webcams. Today, many of these processors are accompanied by a neural processor, which is responsible for using advanced deep learning algorithms to create predictions.
On mobile, you’ve seen many of these apps for image quality enhancement, audio noise reduction, or just style conversion, where a virtual avatar is animated in real time with our movements. These are things that we will see implemented by hardware at the PC level. Which seems like a triviality, but webcams will technically benefit in the process. Moreover, this hypothetical future is now a reality, with models that already incorporate these technologies.
However, and in the end everything has a counterpart and that is that with Deep Fakes many will be able to deceive unsuspecting people and with intentions that it is better not to mention for decorum. Either way, it looks like we won’t get rid of the ugly webcams on the front of laptops. Personally, webcams are one of the things I would eliminate from the standard components of a computer, but that’s already a personal opinion.
