Not a "real" isight camera -- CMOS with fixed-focus, plastic lens"
by vscarp (see profile) - April 8, 2006
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Pros:
Very good software suite including ichat with H.264 compression
Cons:
The interal isight is a bad joke versus the original external isight -- 640 x 480 CCD with auto-focus
Full user opinion
I purchased a 20" iMac at the Apple store in Westfarms mall in Farmington, Connecticut to use for high-quality video conferencing (it was out of stock and I had to have it delivered via the web).
I will focus this review on the video conferencing capabilities of the system.
In the store environment, the external isight camera (connected to another system) appeared to give a significantly better image (vs. the internal isight camera integrated with the 20" iMac). The Apple employee at the store stated emphatically that the internal isight camera included with the iMac was "four times better than the external isight camera" - and that the quality differences that I was seeing were due to "bandwidth limitations" in the store environment. I foolishly believed this statement – and also purchased an external isight camera (for use on a dual-core Mac Mini).
Interestingly, when I connected two systems in the office, the video quality from the external, firewire based isight (connected to the Mac Mini) was far superior to video quality from the internal isight on 20” iMac. This was true in all cases, including when the two machines were connected directly via a crossover cable (RJ-45 to RJ-45, 1000 mbps).
I did some research on the web and turned up the following:
“Like the previous iMac, the iMac Core Duo sports a built in iSight, which sources say uses a CMOS sensor with a fixed-focus plastic lens rather than a CCD sensor with automatic focus like the one used in Apple's stand-alone iSight product.”
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1467
In an attempt to improve the video quality of the system, I purchased an isight plug in called iglasses
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/
This $8 application significantly improved the brightness and the color balancing on both the internal and external isight cameras. In agreement with the link above, the iglasses software confirmed that the internal isight camera on the 20” iMac was fixed-focus and (based on its API) was far less capable than the external isight camera.
I then returned to the Apple site to re-check the specs on the internal isight camera. Apple provides detailed specs on the external isight camera
Sensor: 1/4-inch color CCD image sensor. Resolution: 640x480 VGA. Focus: Autofocus from 50mm to Infinity. Framerate: Full motion video at up to 30 frames per second (FPS), etc.
http://www.apple.com/isight/
For the internal isight in the iMac, they provided no specs - just calling it a "high quality isight" camera – and clearly misr
