You can use the Continuity Camera for FaceTime (obviously), but I’ve also used it with Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom. While my laptop’s camera video looks dull and washed out, my phone’s video looks good—bright, punchy, and crisp. I’m getting tons of compliments now. On Zoom calls and Google Meets, I feel like a motherfucker professional.
If you don’t want to (or can’t) clip your phone to the lid of your laptop, follow my colleague Max Woolf’s lead and get a mount instead. Max uses a 2020 iMac, one of the few Apple desktops with a high-definition webcam, but he wasn’t pleased with the result.
“It works well for Zoom meetings, especially since the conferencing software compresses the video,” he told me, “but for recording things like YouTube videos or live streams, I wanted the best possible quality.”
Max jumped in for a $15 Jumkeet cell phone holder with a long, flexible arm 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 don’t heat up the phone as much,” he said, adding that he appreciates Apple’s tight software integration.
Finally, you don’t have to be in the Apple ecosystem to use your phone as a webcam. Modern Android phones also have great cameras, and there’s no reason people using Windows shouldn’t look their best on video calls.
If you don’t have an iPhone or a Mac, I recommend camouflage, a service that allows you to 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, use your phone’s flashlight as a light source, and more.
For better or worse, we will never return to a world without Zoom, Google Meet, or WhatsApp video calls. But at least now we have easy and inexpensive ways to look our best while talking to Marcia in sales.
