The new laptop of the honor of China’s technology company has been sent with the first industry to go, well, almost unwittingly.
The MagicBook V14 is the first laptop that comes with a 5 megapixel camera with an ultra-wide corner camera of 90 degrees. A number of other devices such as HP Elite Dragonfly business laptops also have a 5 megapixel camera but (a) they tend to be 2-in-1 convertible laptops and (b) they still take into account the small portion of the market.
So why, on this day and age where hybrid works is all anger, where the Microsoft team, zoom and Google meet are the names of households and even mainstream smartphones (like infinix zero 8) boast selfie resolution with selfie resolution with resolution 48 megapixels with a resolution of 48 megapixels, does the laptop owner have to hold with VGA webcam (yes VGA)?
VGA, for those under a certain age, refer to ancient resolution, obsolete, and 480 pixels (or 307,000 pixels). It was the mainstream towards the late last century (1990s) but somehow managed to still find its way to at least one laptop launched in 2021 – namely, Lenovo V17-IIL.
Meanwhile, there might be a funny side in seeing yourself on the screen as Minecraft character, it’s not a sentiment that is shared by many people.
One of the best-selling computer products from the last two years has become a humble webcam. Pandemic has shown that millions of people are not happy with the image quality captured by an integrated laptop webcam and unfortunately, it is not something that will soon change.
HD leads the way
Our sample surveys of 50 laptops are currently sold in Dell, Lenovo and HP – cross gaming, consumers and business circuits – painting gloomy images.
Dell does not have a laptop with a webcam with a higher resolution than 720p (about one million pixels), and it includes the most expensive laptop, $ 5,339 Dell precision 7760 data workstation. Lenovo is no better even for its expensive mega $ 5.159 ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 Mobile Workstation, and Ditto for HP and Apple.
Like standing, webcam HD represents the norm – not an exception – on a laptop launched at 2021. It’s equivalent to having a CD-ROM drive on your laptop – it used to be cool but it’s just a shame lately. So why isn’t there a change?
Well, there are physics, apathetic and priority laws. Pre-pandemic, webcam quality on laptops is far down the priority list because, most people meet in real life and video conferencing is done mainly in the meeting room or on a person’s smartphone, both provide excellent quality.
Which convinced vendors like Dell to stick to HD technology and decrease it to make ultra-portable laptops with small bezels like XPS 13 who won award 13. Others, like honor, have decided to hide your webcam at all in the pop-up button on your board type. Couples – like Asus – go further and eliminate webcams at all because … why not?
The law of physics and capitalism (in general) as a whole also makes a shift to a complicated multi-megapixel laptop webcam. Cellphones tend to be thicker than the laptop lid and the laptop webcam module tends to be horizontally (to fit the bezel), not vertical (like for smartphones). So until there is enough request for a laptop webcam module with a sensor like a smartphone, the transition will not occur.
Then there is apathy reviewer and user: webcam HD is a norm so the reviews and users don’t tend to highlight (or consider) as an anomaly. Only when we, reviewers, acts as a catalyst for change and start highlighting this as a deviation that the reader will pay attention and hopefully the vendor.