Your laptop has it, but is the webcam really necessary?

This writer hates built-in webcams inside laptops for several reasons. For example, we have the fact that sand are integrated into the frame of the screen of the computer. Honestly, for a long time we have expected to see laptops without frames on their screens, not only for aesthetics, but also for functionality. Furthermore, the fact not being able to move the camera gives the worst viewing angles for video conferences. Unfortunately, many users who use it on a daily basis do not consider using a device that offers better quality and greater freedom in terms of their position. This is one of the examples of how detrimental hardware integration is. The key question is: are webcams really such an essential element as to be integrated as standard?

Laptop webcams suck and you know it

As the years have passed, the chips have increased in complexity, being able to add structures that previously occupied several chips in one. For example, those years when sound cards or network cards were sold separately are long gone. Which is not a bad thing if the product falls within acceptable minimum performance specifications.

The problem of many webcams integrated in laptops? It is to put them into operation and see how the image quality of broadcasts is below what is permissible in terms of image quality. Why is this happening? Let’s see:

• A webcam is nothing more than a digital camera and, therefore, what it does is convert what the image sensor captures into a ditto file through an encoding process.
• This process can have various levels of quality that are reflected in the information that will be generated by the video file that our PC will work with.
• In other words, the image quality will depend on the bitrate at which the file is compressed to be transmitted over the Internet.
• The problem comes when we have to have the lowest possible latency and one way to achieve this is to reduce the transfer time, so the information ends up being eliminated and with it detail.

Let’s not forget that any sensation of delay in a video call is negatively perceived by the end user, so in the end what prevails is speed over image quality. However, in many cases it is not justifiable and we wonder if it is justifiable to integrate a webcam into a PC if the result is that there is poor quality.

A section that will improve in the following years

The addition of 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 have seen many of these applications for image quality improvement, audio noise reduction or simply 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 seem like a banality, but webcams will technically benefit from it in the process. What’s more, that hypothetical future is now a reality, with models that already incorporate these technologies.

However, and to finish everything has a counterpart and that is that with the Deep Fakes, many will be able to deceive unsuspecting people and with intentions that it is better not to mention for decorum. In any case, it seems that we will not get rid of the horrendous webcams on the front of laptops. Personally, webcams are one of the things that I would eliminate from the components that come standard on a computer, but this is already a personal opinion.