Following widespread complaints about the webcam in the studio adApple will be releasing a separate firmware update very soon to address the issues.
Studio Display owners reported that the image quality of its webcam was noticeably weaker than that of the iPad Pro, which should theoretically be the same. They’re producing washed-out, noisy images, they complained, while the crop is “ridiculously high,” according to the Macworld columnist Jason Swift.
macOS Monterey 12.4 Beta 3. These adjustments seemed to improve the situation to some extent, although by no means everyone was satisfied; Jason Snell described it as a definite improvement, but added, “I hope the team at Apple working on this firmware will continue this work because there is more that can be done to improve things.”
Apple then announced that you wouldn’t need this Update macOS to get the webcam fix: It would bundle the optimizations into a separate firmware update, Studio Display Firmware 15.5. This update, according to the company, “refines camera tuning, including improved noise reduction, contrast and framing.” And it’s almost there, after yesterday’s seeding of the Release Candidate (RC).
The RC is only available to beta testers, but it’s one of the very final stages in the beta process and signals that the public release is imminent. And the fact that it’s available as a separate update is a big deal: as iMore argues, it is never made sense for display firmware changes being incorporated into macOS updates, and this separation will make it easier for Apple to quickly respond to more specific issues without having to go through the process of a macOS update.
