The iMac iSight Bluish Man Show

One of the things I always dread about engaging a new technology is the unforeseen adverse consequence. In other words, what sounds like a great idea instead turns out to be a good one with a bug or a mediocre one with a hassle. The iMac’s internal iSight camera is along the lines of the former.

I used the camera for the first time to connect up with my son Tim who was using a regular external iSight. Before this, I was connecting up using an external iSight camera on an iFlex mount on either my G5 iMac or my dual G5 PowerMac. With the new camera in my Intel-powered iMac, I noticed almost immediately a blue shading on the right side of my face. Tim could see it, too. At first, I thought it was entirely due to reflected light off the iMac’s blue desktop so I tried several other desktop backgrounds. They had little effect. The only thing that made the blue tint fade was sitting back about three feet. I’m fairly convinced that the blue tint is an artifact of the iMac’s backlight.

This is one case where you pay for the convenience of having the camera bezel mounted changing or adding lighting. I will probably do the latter.

Of course, Tim illustrated another limitation of bezel-mounted cameras when he used his external iSight to show me an iMovie 4 track he was having problems with. I could actually see how his iMovie was set up. The only way I could do that with a bezel-mounted camera would be to try to snapshot the desktop and send that. There may be a way to do that, but it’s not intuitive.

I like the elegance of an internal camera; but if you think it’s the “be-all, end-all”, think again.