It’s fair to say that the recent lockdown and boom in working from home has made the nation take a closer look at their home technology arrangement. While in the opening weeks of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, retailers struggled to keep up with the sudden demand for home-office tech and furniture. For a while, it was quite difficult to find desks and desk lamps, keyboard and computer mice, video call headsets, and, of course, webcams.
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Now the dust is starting to settle, many are beginning to look at the quality of their budget webcam disdain. Grainy images, unflattering lighting, and poor synchronisation is the bane of many Zoom, Skype, or MS Teams video calls. London-based app developers Reincubate has found a solution to this problem by designing Camo, an app that repurposes an iPhone’s superior camera as a webcam for Apple desktops and Macbook. A build for Windows operating systems is currently in development.
Reincubate Camo is plug and play, and allows users to access the “1080p super hi-res streaming” capabilities locked inside iPhones and iPads. The app facilitates image tuning, with software providing lens selection, lighting, colour and saturation correction, image cropping, and focus all being controlled from the computer. For those who are not sure about the finer details, there are several camera presets.
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The app will be compatible with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, WebEx Teams, Slack, and much more. To see the full list, visit Camo's FAQ page. Even more compatibility is road mapped for future updates.
Reincubate’s founder Aiden Fitzpatrick points to poor video quality from built-in Apple Mac webcams as the impetus behind the app’s development. “I had a top of the range Mac, but it annoyed me that friends who joined calls on their iPhones got better quality than I did,” Fitzpatrick states. He goes on to say that rather than dropping $1,000-plus on a DSLR setup, Camo seeks to “capture that pro quality without all that money.”
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The free version of the app will provide a 720p video, and a default wide or selfie lens. A Camo subscription will unlock all of the filtering and features, and will cost £34.99 per year.
According to The Evening Standard, Reincubate Camo will be available to download on the Apple App Store from July 16.