I take a lot of photos and videos and I actually opted for a camera that’s mostly 1080p this year. Why? Because at this point barely anyone is actually using 4K to view content. And the bandwidth and processor power add a lot to the cost.

It’s nice to shoot in 4K for flexibility of cropping etc later. But for me, I decided to save money this year. And I’m happy with my decision.

So for a video call camera, personally I think 1080p is totally sufficient.

Better quality (sensor, color, compression, networking) is much more important than raw resolution.

Even most external webcams are limited to 1080p. It's not practical to stream 1440p or higher right now, on demand streaming is super computationally heavy.

it's too bad Apple has an irrational vendetta against the company that makes the best hardware video encoders on the market. NVENC is really, really good, at 1080p you need to be running 6-12 dedicated cores (depending on settings) in order to match the quality.

AMD chips would have failed if they had used them too - that was the era of "baking your GPU" due to failed solder bumps and that definitely applied to AMD too, Apple is just such a clientzilla that they demanded payment for an industry-wide problem caused by the switch to RoHS-compliant solders. I think it's much more about control - CUDA is a third-party ecosystem that Apple doesn't want its clients getting dependent on, because then that would constrain apple's choices in hardware. Nobody locks in Apple's clients except Apple.

I've read that quality is largely limited by optics, and optics are limited by space in the MacBook line (just a few mm). Not sure why Apple wouldn't improve it on the iMac (a few cm depth to work with!).

They don't have "a few cm depth", according to the page; it's "11.5 millimeters thin".

That's on them for putting that constraint upon themselves. Not sure why a desktop computer needs to be razor thin, it lives on a desk...

I don't consider it a constraint they're imposing on themselves but rather a goal they're actively trying to achieve (decreasing the device size and profile). Some people have small desks. A small footprint desktop computer that looks incredible because of its thinness is a wonderful achievement. Even on larger desks, now the end consumer has more room.

Reducing the size of electronics has always been a goal for consumer hardware companies. Look no further than the memory stick which now supports tens and hundreds of gigabytes on a piece of metal smaller than your finger nail.

It's quite nice having devices that have such small profiles. It's the result of incredible engineering to fit more power in a smaller space for really very few tradeoffs.

I'd guess to not make the Macbooks look ridiculously bad.

1080p is plenty for video calls (in my opinion). It's not like you're going to be using an iMac for serious photography.

I'm not sure that, one, I want people to see my mug in even higher def or, two, that I trust my ISP's upstream bandwidth to carry my 2k+ video feed very well.

I'd just like to have a webcam with a large aperture and nice bokeh, but it seems the only way is a complex setup with a DSLR, capture card, and associated mess of cables and mounting brackets.

For cameras, the resolution is only one of a ton of relevant factors for quality. What's most important is the sensor quality.

The 2020 iMac has a similar 1080p camera + ISP, and image quality is already very good even in low light. And webcams higher than 1080p aren't as necessary since no consumer video conferencing supports higher than 1080p anyways.

You don't want more pixels, you want better pixels, optics and positioning.

Pretty sure you want more pixels, too. And if they announced a 4K webcam, it'd be amazing and everyone would be raving about it.

If they announced a 4K webcam I would immediately restrict it to 1080p. Why on earth would I want one?

A lot of Youtubers like using 4K (or higher) cameras because the resulting video looks better at 1080p.

I would think the M1s are more than fast enough to do a nice job downsampling in real time from 4K to 1080p.

Also, the M1s are fast enough to be someone's main computer for a long, long time. 4K future proofs your system a little more.

> A lot of Youtubers like using 4K (or higher) cameras because the resulting video looks better at 1080p.

A lot of Youtubers are not streaming, which is what most people use their laptop webcams for.

> I would think the M1s are more than fast enough to do a nice job downsampling in real time from 4K to 1080p.

Just video encoding a 1080p stream in itself is already extremely intensive even for high-end CPUs. Especially considering that I (like most users) am simply trying to take a call, and have actual work already going on that I want my processor to spend its time on.

It's a Bayer sensor. So yea you do want more pixels.

4K downsampled to 1080p looks a lot better than a 1080p "native" sensor.

Why? I think 720p is the maximum need for a front facing camera on any device. What would you want a 4K front facing camera for? Most video-conferencing wont even allow more than 480p to preserve bandwidth.

Because the less pixelated it looks the more natural a conversation flows?

Are you asking why is it important to have a good camera for online video conferencing? Look at all the guides that teach people how to use DSLRs as their webcams.

>Because the less pixelated it looks the more natural a conversation flows?

That's not a problem, since Zoom and co don't stream in higher resolutions anyway, and even 720p will be highly compressed

Did you know there are applications other than Zoom and Co out there?

Did you know that it doesn't matter, since Zoom and Co is what most use?

Plenty of very good DSLRs come at 1080p, exactly like this webcam. And they take better photos and videos than many sensors out there stuffed with unnecessary pixels.

Using resolution as a shorthand for actual image quality doesn't reflect the reality of how cameras work, never mind that full HD already pushes the limits of most people's streaming capabilities (both video encoding and bandwidth).

If you are a professional video maker, you'll anyway have something better than the internal mic and camera. Not just for quality but also for position and practicality of moving it.

We are talking here about the average person's use-case

Sure and the average person can benefit from a higher resolution camera.