I Got A $30 Clip That Lets Me Use My iPhone As A Webcam, And Honestly, I’ll Never Go Back
You can use Continuity Camera for FaceTime (obviously), but I’ve also used it with Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom. While video from my laptop’s camera looks dull and washed out, video from my phone looks right, bright, punchy, and sharp. I’m getting tons of compliments now. On Zoom calls and Google Meets, I feel like a goddamn professional.
If you don’t want to (or can’t) clip your phone to your laptop’s lid, follow my colleague Max Woolf’s lead and get a stand instead. Max uses a 2020 iMac, one of the few Apple desktops with a high-definition webcam, but he wasn’t satisfied with the result.
“It works fine for Zoom meetings, especially since conference software compresses video,” he told me, “but for recording things like YouTube videos or livestreaming, I wanted the best quality possible.”
Max sprung for a $15 Jumkeet cellphone holder with a long, bendy arm kind of like a silly straw that his iPhone 13 Pro phone clips into. He’s still in the early days of using it, but he said the results are promising.
“Both Portrait Mode and Studio Lighting definitely improve webcam quality, and it doesn’t heat up the phone that much,” he said, adding that he appreciates Apple’s tight software integration.
Finally, you don’t have to be in the Apple ecosystem at all to use your phone as a webcam. Modern Android phones have great cameras too, and there’s no reason why people using Windows shouldn’t look their best on video calls.
If you don’t have an iPhone or a Mac, I recommend Camo, a service that lets you use your Android phone with a Windows computer. You can use Camo for free, but paying $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year lets you remove the Camo watermark from your video and use your phone’s flashlight as a light source, among other things.
For better or for worse, we’re never going back to a world without Zoom, Google Meet, or WhatsApp video calling. But at least now we have easy, inexpensive ways to look our best while talking to Marcia from sales.
You can use Continuity Camera for FaceTime (obviously), but I’ve also used it with Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom. While video from my laptop’s camera looks dull and washed out, video from my phone looks right, bright, punchy, and sharp. I’m getting tons of compliments now. On Zoom calls and Google…
