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iSight - Photo Booth green led on, but no image

Like in title, when I open Photo Booth app the webcam and the green led light turn on, but I have no image coming from the webcam and the screen remains black - the red screenshot button is disabled.

I already tried all other solutions from the internet, including try with other apps like FaceTime and Microsoft Teams (they work fine), reset of the SMC (Shift-Ctrl-Option-Power buttons pressed for 10 seconds and then restart), also using Terminal command "sudo killall VDCAssistant" and "sudo killall AppleCameraAssistant".


My computer is a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) - macOS Big Sur vers. 11.0.1

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Nov 17, 2020 3:26 PM

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3 replies

Dec 17, 2020 11:51 AM in response to Jopilot

This forum is for the original iSight -- an external FireWire camera. For issues with an internal camera, you might have better luck in the forum for your computer. Here's the link to the MacBook Pro forum:


https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro


As I mentioned, Apple has developed a habit of sowing confusion about which product is which. The moment I saw the words "internal iSight camera" on a spec sheet, I knew there would be problems. I understand it from a marketing perspective -- during its regrettably short lifetime, the iSight was one of the best webcams on the market, and they wanted to capitalize on that -- but it causes problems when it comes to tech support.

Dec 17, 2020 10:20 AM in response to Jopilot

Are you using an internal iSight camera or the external FireWire model? I'm assuming the latter because that's the forum we're in, but I thought to ask because you mention it does work for FaceTime and other threads have mentioned the external iSight stops working completely under Big Sur. According to some of those threads, FireWire support was dropped in Big Sur, but I haven't looked into that myself and haven't seen any responses yet from the most experienced hands among us.


(Taking a moment to gripe: it's a real pain in the patoot when Apple applies the same name to a different product. Whatever happened to the idea of making it easy to know what you're actually using?)


We started having the same problem in Google Meet this morning, but I haven't had a chance to check anything out yet because it's the machine my daughter uses for school. A key difference in my situation: we're running High Sierra (10.13.6) on a Mac Mini (late 2014). We intentionally did not upgrade the system beyond that because the external iSight's microphone stopped working in Mojave (10.14).

iSight - Photo Booth green led on, but no image

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