2018 MacBook Air owners report poor FaceTime camera quality

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MacBook Air 2018
Bag one before they're all gone.
Photo: Apple

Some adopters of the 2018 MacBook Air are reporting poor camera quality during FaceTime calls.

Apple’s newest ultraportable has a 720p camera above its display, which should provide HD video capture. However, for a small few, its performance seems a lot worse than that.

Almost everything about the new MacBook Air is an upgrade over its predecessors. It sports an improved design with a gorgeous Retina display, a larger trackpad and the latest butterfly keyboard, and faster internals.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is its FaceTime HD camera. It remains a 720p sensor, and some say the performance it delivers is actually worse than the 720p sensor in the previous MacBook Air.

FaceTime fails to impress on new MacBook Air

“I got the 2018 Air for just one day and the issue was there the first time I tried the camera,” writes one users on the Apple Communities support forums. “The blurring is uniform across all regions of the image and independent of environmental lighting.”

“I have the same issue,” writes another. “My colleagues confirmed too that on the other end of a video call my video quality is definitely not HD … I tried with FaceTime, Skype, Hangouts — same issue with all.”

One poster suggests that the issue may be somewhat common after confirming every 2018 MacBook Air display unit in their local Apple Store suffers from the same problem. Some believe it may be a driver error, which could easily be fixed by a software update.

Some fear that the camera hardware is the source of the problem, which would mean affected units will need to be returned to Apple for repair or replacement.

Apple remains silent for now

Apple is yet to acknowledge this issue, so we don’t know for sure how severe it really is. We’ve contacted the company for some clarification and we’ll update this post if we get a response.

What’s the camera quality like on your 2018 MacBook Air? Let us know down in the comments.

Via: iPhone in Canada

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