Webcam on Studio Display screen is criticized for poor quality, clear noise

Apple announced its new high-end displays during the company’s ‘Peek Performance’ event earlier this month, called Studio Display. This is a 27-inch 5K monitor with an integrated A13 Bionic chipset, starting at $1,599. But once it got into the hands of professionals, at least one of its problems became apparent. It’s the built-in camera that’s not so great quality.

This is an important issue, as it is one of the unique aspects of this product. Because this built-in webcam supports the Center Stage feature, allowing it to track movement and keep the subject in the frame. The specs page for Studio Display doesn’t mention the camera’s resolution when recording video, but only says it’s a 12MP ultra-wide sensor with a 122-degree field of view and f/2.4 aperture.

During the first wave of responses to Studio Display, many early product testers mentioned the low quality of the camera. This is considered a particularly unusual drawback, because Apple and the rest of the computer industry are focused on improving the quality of webcams in general. TechCrunch says the camera system “produces grainy, low-contrast images and is generally poor at both local and remote recording.” It’s even lower quality when compared to the 24-inch iMac with the M1 chip. Gizmodo wrote that “the skin shown looks too smooth and the image is grainy”. The Wall Street Journal ‘s Joanna Stern posted comparison photos with other cameras on Twitter, also showing the underperformance of Studio Display.

Apple has now confirmed that the low quality of the webcame on Studio Display is a bug.

“We discovered an issue where the system was not performing as expected,” the company said. We will improve in a future software update.”

Studio Display has the same Apple A13 Bionic chipset in the iPhone 11 and second-generation iPhone SE series, so the fact that the camera performs worse than the built-in webcams on laptops is considered by many experts to be a bit of a “nothing”. strange”.