The turnaround from screen to home media has gotten short enough to where it’s fine to wait for a high quality version. Cams were good in the 80s when you bought the VHS tapes from some dude selling them out of a box down in the subway. Though the odds of brining home a blank were pretty good!
Laptop cameras are terrible because they need to be super thin. Why? Because people like laptop lids that are super thin.
Some manufacturers sort of fixed that by placing the camera somewhere else. On the one hand, the camera is a bit better, on the other, placing the camera by the keyboard gives you permanent chin face.
Qualcomm laptops seem to have better processors for their terrible webcams at least, but they’re still webcams.
If you need a good webcam, you may need to buy an external one. You need to check reviews, but many USB webcams are excellent. Still won’t solve the problem of your video being compressed to shit by video conferencing software, but it’s a start!
Do be careful, the like 20–50€ USB webcams that you can usually find are absolute dogshit IME and probably blown away by any webcam on a good recent laptop (the one I have certainly is by the one on my MacBook and IIRC the laptop I had before also had a better camera). Personally I wouldn’t trust any of the ones I can see listed on amazon right now. A lot of times they have horrible autofocus, brightness adjustment, noise and so on even if the theoretical image resolution is advertised as 1080p for example. (Of course, you can always send it back but still.)
If you want actually good quality, get a real video camera that you can connect to a computer, or if possible use your phone back camera if it’s good enough (I know Macs can use the iPhone camera as a built in thing, not sure about other combinations of phone/computer).
I’m using an app to use my Android phone as a webcam, which works great (good low light performance!) provided I can stand it up somewhere above my laptop screen (finicky). You can accidentally knock it over. Might be worth considering if you don’t use the camera much - otherwise an external one will probably attach better and he more stable
My phone is way thinner than the laptop lid but the cameras front and back are better, even inscreen holepunch camera is better on a phone than any laptop
That must be a chunky laptop lid! It’s not just thickness, it’s also parts availability. Most laptops are super thin so the market for USB webcam daughterboards is optimised for shitty, thin laptop cameras.
There’s also post-processing: a webcam of the same shitty image sensor size can look a lot better if the raw data is processed better. That’s why many Qualcomm laptops look to have better webcams even though the camera quality is just as bad, they just use the skills they’ve gathered in the mobile space to process the image into a more pleasing image.
So of the three happiest distros, two aren’t very concerned with mainstream appeal and will carry on contentedly doing their thing while ignoring rankings like this. Sounds about right.
I really don’t understand how people can do it. I moved to a developing nation in the Caribbean. Everyone’s livelihood is connected to nature here. Reefs, especially. Yet every local I have met will casually toss their garbage. I went to a festival on the beach and most of the locals were burying their trash in the sand just enough to keep it from blowing away in the moment. Some don’t even bother with that pretense. There were trash cans in easy strolling distance, every 50 feet.
The roads and waterways are stuffed with garbage here. I live on a canal that connects to the sea, and have watched tour guides and fishing expeditions tossing plastic bottles, polystyrene food containers and plastic bags overboard daily for two years. These are the same people protesting dredging their flats and cayes near the reef, but inexplicably and deliberately ignorant of their own impact.
Also interesting to observe is the speed at which the nation transitioned from class and aluminum drink containers to plastics. Mt first visit here was just three years ago, and most drinks were in bottles that were clearly recycled. Laser etch marks, rubbing from other bottles, etc. Now its all plastic. There’s a national ban on single use plastics, but it isn’t enforced, and it all ends up in the water and in the ground.
When I first witnessed the ghastly indifference of everyone here regarding proper disposal of garbage, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like watching a bunch of five year-old kids, the way they shamelessly toss their trash to the wind.
Oh! I actually can personally answer this one. I’ve been a competitive air gun and rimfire .22 LR for years and even attended college on a rifle program scholarship at a D1 program (yes! The US has a major collegiate rifle program)
Traveling internationally depended much on where you were going. We competed at the international junior Olympic championships just outside of London one year in the UK. We had to package all ammo and firearms separately, in locked containers which ultimately wasn’t that big a deal. As with flying with firearms in the US, it ultimately comes down to how familiar those such as gate agents and check-in staff are at the airport with their country’s firearm travel laws. Flying out of the US was always easy as they’re used to firearms, but flying back to the US was sometimes a nightmare and we’d get to the airport up to 6 hours before a flight to deal with any BS.
Now there’s the delima. You find yourself a way to make money that isn’t working, and everyone else will start doing it. When everyone is doing it, some people will start to invent in doing it (education for example). These people will do better, and take a higher share of the activity. These people, having invested, will be required to preform consistently. Just to make there money back.
Business is just hiring different people to do different things to Make money. You can then hire people to do put different pieces together for you so then you don’t have to do anything.
kbin.life
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