Because we all live in a world of nonstop Zoom calls now, things like webcams actually matter. We all know laptop cameras are not great, and if you use an external monitor you might not even have one built in. That’s the boat I was in, since work gave me a huge 16” MacBook Pro that is way too big to use as a laptop, so it’s docked and connected to some random LG monitor.

I had some ancient Logitech webcam, but it was garbage. Never focused, really bad at low light, etc. I remembered hearing about and app called Camo that let you use your iPhone as a webcam. I installed the trial and the difference in quality was immediately apparent. Like, way better. Once I tried that, I couldn’t go back.

One tricky situation, though: how to mount the phone above my monitor? This was before continuity camera, so Belkin hadn’t yet made their little contraption for MagSafeing your phone on top. I ended up rigging a Rube Goldberg contraption together with a clamp, articulating tripod arm, and MagSafe cold shoe mount from Moment. It’s super janky, but it works well enough.

So, once that was figured out, I subscribed to Camo (like $39/year or something) and happily used it for a year or so. It has plenty of tools for tweaking the image, and was pretty rock solid. One downside, though, was that it required the phone to be plugged in via USB. Understandable, but a pain when setting things up multiple times a day for Zoom meetings.

Then I noticed that my SetApp subscription added a new app called Detail that was similar to Camo, but included in the subscription I already had. It also claimed to work over Wi-Fi instead of having to plugging in, which was intriguing. In practice, though, the Wi-Fi thing didn’t work very well, and you could tell it was super compressed. It didn’t have the same level of tweaking as Camo either, but it was passable.

Automating Annoying Stuff

One thing about these products is that they need to have apps on both the phone and Mac running at the same time to work. The Mac app receives the signal from the phone and registers it as a virtual camera for apps like Zoom to use, and the phone app sends that signal. I guess with Camo, it also does a lot of the image processing on the phone as well. This is all well and good, but it does pose a problem: making sure the apps are running when you need them to be. On the Mac, it’s usually just running in the background, no big deal. The phone, however, is a pain. Having to unlock it and open the app, and then gingerly set the phone onto the MagSafe stand thingy without accidentally exiting the app or opening control center, is a non-trivial task.

What I ended up doing was cobbling together some Shortcuts. I don’t use Shortcuts nearly enough, but this was a good opportunity to try them out for something actually useful. The basic gist of what I did:

  • On my Mac, create a shortcut that
      – changes the focus mode to Zoom Meeting (custom focus mode)– opens OBS using a shell command to start the virtual camera (/Applications/OBS.app/Contents/MacOS/obs --startvirtualcam &)– sets a HomeKit scene that turns on my El Gato Keylight Air and desk light strip, as well as lowers my green screen – hides the OBS window.
  • On my phone, creation a shortcut automation that
      – triggers on the change to the Zoom Meeting focus mode (focus modes sync across all your devices, which means changing it on my Mac propagates it to my phone, allowing this automation to happen automatically. Cool!)– opens the appropriate app (Camo or Detail)– if I’m using Detail at the time, turn off screen-rotation lock (Detail doesn’t let you change the orientation in the Mac app, while Camo does).

I also set up a “meeting clean up” shortcut that

  • turns off the Zoom Meeting focus mode
  • turns on a HomeKit scene that puts my green screen up, turns off the Keylight.

And an automation on my phone when the detail app exits to turn the rotation lock back on.

Whew. Yeah, it’s a lot. While it’s kinda fun to think all of those things through and get it working, it’s a lot of work and relatively brittle.

Dedicated Webcam?

Some folks in the Mac Slack channel at work bought one of the Opal cameras that purported to be “DSLR quality” in a normal(ish) webcam form factor. It was spendy (like $300) but I figured I’d give it a try since it would be super convenient to not have to think about putting my phone up while still having good image quality. However, the quality was nowhere near what I was getting with Camo and my phone. I tried tweaking the software, but it just didn’t get much better in the lighting available in my office. So, I requested a refund. To my surprise, they refunded me immediately and told me to go ahead and keep the camera. Maybe it’ll improve as the software gets better.

Finally, Continuity Camera

Ok, enough backstory. When macOS Ventura came out, one of the things it included was Continuity Camera™, which was basically Camo being Sherlocked. I tried it out and, true to form, Apple was able to make it much nicer in many ways since they own the whole stack, and they, of course, made it far too simple in some other ways.

First off, pretty much all the annoying shit is gone. Since it’s baked into the operating systems, there’s no need to run apps on either the Mac or the iPhone, so all the weird shenanigans for having things set up is no longer necessary. What this means in practice is that I can just toss my phone up onto the magnet when I’m getting ready for a call and whenever Zoom accesses the camera it Just Works. No need to start apps or turn the phone on or anything.

And yeah, I didn’t say anything about plugging it in. They got things to work over Wi-Fi really well compared to Detail (I haven’t tried the Camo update that supports Wi-Fi) and the added convenience really adds up.

Since it’s an Apple camera, it means you can take advantage of the built-in camera effects as well, like portrait mode and Center Stage which follows your face around automatically. The portrait mode is quite good compared to Camo’s, and light years better than the god awful Zoom blur things, but obviously not as good as a real DSLR. Center Stage is pretty neat, but it can be really nauseating after a while as it constantly moves the focus around to follow your head moving or your arms while gesticulating. Turning it off also makes the image a lot sharper.

So, overall, it’s really nice! But, there are some annoyances:

  • While the Wi-Fi connection works really well, it requires that you can’t have AirPlay going at the same time. It’s understandable since they both likely use up a ton of bandwidth, but it requires that AirPlay not even be connected, which means I’ve been having to close down the Music app when using the camera. Not a giant deal, but an annoyance.
  • Being an Apple feature, there are basically no controls over things. The Camera effects are there, but you can’t do anything to control the image quality, exposure, cropping, zoom, etc. etc. Camo really excels at that type of stuff, letting you tweak tons of things and saving them for the future. Overall, though, the Apple quality on everything is Good Enough to not worry too much about it.
  • Since the wireless connection works so well, it means the phone is doing some pretty intense stuff without being connected to power. Of course, I like not having to plug it in, but killing my phone’s battery after a few calls kinda sucks. So, sometimes I’ve been plugging it in just for power. I’m going to try to see if I can rig up a MagSafe charger onto my Rube Goldberg machine to provide some easy power while keeping things stuck above the monitor, but I’m uncertain that’s going to actually work.

So, overall, I’m happy with it, especially when compared to all the alternatives. Getting a new studio display with a built-in camera would probably be the easiest answer, but they’re expensive, and the iPhone is still going to provide a better image.