Now that the "dark band" bug has been fixed on the webcam, and the "mirror" app looks better.....what's the story with all the noise?

Sure, it's a basic 640x480 webcam, but WTF is with all the pixellated garbage? Even cheap webcams from Staples look infinitely better than that!

Given the nice camera on the front, I'm presuming it's some sort of driver issue - surely the hardware can't be that crappy? Surely?

Does anyone have the benefit of concrete info on this issue? Can it be fixed? Will it?

My guess would be a lack of any real-time processing.

The crappier the camera the more processing you need to do to hide the poor quality. As the front camera seems to have been totally thrown on for no particular reason, I am guessing only the very basic driver support is there, whereas the main camera will have all sorts of bells and whistles enabled.

I'd hardly say the front camera is there for no reason. Maybe it isn't providing much benefit right now, but the possibility exists that a Skype client could show up that supports the camera and allows video calls to be made.

front cam appears to work for Googletalk conversations at mo but heavy processing is reported.

i believe that with the pre-release handsets (with pre-release firmware) you could initiate a Google Talk video call, but of course the quality wasn't that great.

fact is: the camera is supposed to be there for a reason, and while the latest update has improved the image it is still no-where near what it should be. my Nokia E90 has a front facing camera and has no image quality issues. Regardless of the fact that the N900 runs Maemo, that shouldn't matter - the front facing camera image quality issue should really be addressed as soon as possible.

I guess they could implement a huge blur effect ;-)

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the camera doesn't work....it works just fine....I'm concerned about the abysmal quality of the image.

@Alex - I'm aware of post-processing, but surely the raw image data shouldn't be this bad? Even when I completely cover the camera with my thumb, I don't see a flat black image...I see the same noise!

All I want to know is the hard technical truth....

How do you get it to work with Googletalk? I tried with no success

Sorry, got it 'work' when initiating video chat from laptop towards N900.
With MacOSX 10.5.11 and Firefox with latest Google talk plug-in video starts for couple of seconds but then chrashes.

I don't think its even that, I though it was qvga? Which would look like crap if it was blown up bigger then a postage stamp. So qvga meant for bright lights only?