Webcam Test

Press start and allow the browser to use the camera. The picture appears, and underneath it you get the resolution actually being sent, the frame rate measured from real frames, and a judgement on your lighting. If something is wrong, the line above the numbers names the worst thing rather than listing three problems and leaving you to pick — because people fix whichever one they read first, not the one ruining the call.

No. Everything happens in the page: the picture is read in your browser, the numbers are computed there, and the still you can take is held in memory and thrown away when you leave the page or take another. There is no account, no upload and no storage — which is worth checking on any site that asks you to point a camera at yourself, this one included.

Because resolution is negotiated, not fixed. The browser asks for a size and the camera driver offers what it feels like giving — often 640×480 even on hardware that can do 1080p, and often lower again if another program has the camera open or the machine is under load. This page asks for 720p and then reports what it actually got, which is the number that decides how you look.

Thirty is what everything targets. Twenty-four is the floor for motion that still reads as motion — it is the cinema standard for that reason. Below fifteen a face becomes a slideshow and lip movement stops matching the audio, which is the thing people notice without being able to name. If yours is low, the usual cause is light: a camera in a dim room slows down to gather more of it, so adding a lamp often fixes the frame rate as well as the picture.

That there is a bright light source in the shot behind you, almost always a window. The camera exposes for the bright part and your face goes dark, so you arrive as a silhouette. It is invisible from where you are sitting, because your eyes have adjusted and the screen looks normal. The fix is to turn around: put the window in front of you rather than behind, or close the blind and light your face from the direction of the screen.

Because the browser hides device names until you have granted permission. Before that, any page could work out what hardware you own without asking you for anything — so the names arrive with the permission, and until then a numbered placeholder is all there is to show.

In order: that you allowed the permission when the browser asked, that the right camera is picked in the list, that no physical shutter or privacy slider is closed over the lens, and that no other program has hold of it — a video call left open in another tab or app is the usual culprit, and on Windows it takes the camera exclusively. If the page says the camera is in use, that is what happened.

The preview is, because people expect to see themselves the way a mirror shows them and an unmirrored preview feels wrong to move in. The measurement and the still are not — they are what the camera actually sees, which is what everybody else sees. You can turn the mirror off with the checkbox if you want to read the text on the mug behind you.

Yes, on any modern mobile browser. A phone held upright sends a portrait picture — 720×1280 rather than 1280×720 — and this reads that as 720p rather than calling it low, which is the mistake a test that only looks at the width makes.