FaceTime Zoomed In on LED Cinema Display

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FaceTime Zoomed In on LED Cinema Display

I'm trying to use the built in iSight on my LED Cinema Display with FaceTime.

The resulting camera image is very zoomed in, at least 300%, and looks horrible. It looks like it's been digitally zoomed by 300% - artifacted, etc. For my head to fully be in frame in the iSight camera, I have to sit about four feet away from the monitor, which isn't right. I need to restore the image to what I assume is a non-zoomed in frame.

My MBP camera shows it properly, not zoomed in. If I use the LED iSight with Gotomeeting or Skype, the image is not zoomed in either.

How do I fix this?

Posted on Feb 7, 2013 3:48 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 6, 2014 10:08 AM in response to plochner

I have a similar problem after updating to Mavericks. The conferencing app we use at work (Vidyo) is now zoomed in, where on the previous Mountain Lion it was not.

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Answer 2

plochner Author

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Feb 6, 2014 10:25 AM in response to SmogMonkey42

My iSight issue was pre-Mavericks, most like in Mountain Lion when I wrote this message a year ago. I just checked it again and the problem persists. In Skype, I'm perfectly framed. There are several inches of space between my head and the sides of the camera image/frame. I'm framed the same way in Photobooth as well, which is an Apple product.

In Facetime, I'm somehow zoomed in so close that my ears and top of my head are pushed up to top and sides of the frame. Again it looks like Facetime on the LED display applies about a 200 to 300% zoom, which I can't seem to disable.

I'm also not interested in spending $20 for the iGlasses addon to disable this auto-zoom.

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Answer 3

plochner Author

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Feb 6, 2014 10:36 AM in response to plochner

I've done a bit more research today, a year later, and it doesn't look like it's possible to disable this horrible 200 - 300% auto zoom with the LED Cinema Display iSight camera and Facetime.

Facetime just loves to zoom in, destroying the framing and putting up a horribly lit, digitally artifacted and zoomed in picture. The resulting picture is horribly lit because it can't auto-expose at such a zoom. It's really poor.

Anyone got a plist hack of some sort to prevent Facetime from doing this to the iSight camera on the Cinema Display?

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Answer 4

Feb 6, 2014 12:26 PM in response to plochner

Bummer. I wind up just using my MBPro's built-in Facetime camera which doesn't have this issue. I haven't a clue why the Cinema Display iSight would cause the zoom to happen and, of course, there aren't any 'nerd knobs' to turn. Didn't realize this question was a year ago, we only noticed it around here just recently, since most of our MBPro's are now on Mavericks.

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