While I’m yet to really appreciate any major benefit of the Nintendo Switch 2’s GameChat feature, I’m nevertheless always hardware-curious. I’m a tech nerd; I want to know what companies are shipping and how good it is. With that in mind, let me sound the alarm with a warning: do not buy that cutesy Switch 2 camera shaped like a Piranha Plant. If you buy it, to be blunt, peripheral company Hori is absolutely pantsing you.
Let’s cut to the chase: the Hori camera, which comes in a cute licensed shape of a Piranha Plant, is rubbish. It’s not rubbish on the outside, though. First impressions are good: it’s got lovely packaging, and when you free it from its box only the most miserable of gits would conclude that this thing isn’t incredibly charismatic.
There’s even really clever design touches. The camera itself is a USB-C, which means it can be plugged directly into the Switch 2 and stick out of the top of it, making it the only camera marketed specifically for Switch 2 right now that is properly appropriate for handheld mode (if such a use case ever emerges). When you want to place the camera on a surface, you dock it into its Super Mario Bros. pipe-shaped dock, then plug that into the Switch. So far, so clever.
Plus, the manner in which you use the camera’s privacy cover is absolutely genius. You just squeeze the Mario staple’s jaws closed, which in turn covers the camera. Clever! Neat! In fact, this might be better than the official Nintendo camera’s privacy cover because it’s far more obvious at a glance when the camera is in privacy mode.
But the positivity stops dead here. For when you boot the camera… what the hell, man.
Here I am in Switch 2’s USB Camera Test suite, pictured using the official Nintendo camera:
The Nintendo camera has been clearly thoughtfully designed for the gaming purposes and systems Nintendo has in mind. It’s wide angled, so you can pick up everyone playing in a broad living room for a Mario Party session or the like. It’s relatively high resolution (1080p), meaning you will be able to see the minutiae of the grimace in somebody’s expression as you smash them with a blue shell or steal their star. It handles a light environment, like my messy office, relatively well. While background detail is a touch grainy, I’m sure some of you beautiful nerds can identify some of the games on the shelf behind me, or make out an Arwing, or a Sonic Screwdriver, or whatever. That’s good.
With that noted, here I am captured with Hori’s Pirahna Plant:
So the Hori camera is… well, it’s a 640×480 resolution webcam that looks like it’s fallen out of 2006. Colours are blown out. Detail is poor. There’s no wide angle, so it covers a much narrower area of the room. It’s inferior in every way.
Looking it up, this camera is in fact the same resolution as the Xbox Live Vision camera from 2006, an oft-forgotten accessory that got most of its use by the 360’s infamous Uno perverts. This refers to the people who did inappropriate things with the camera while playing Uno, for the record, not all Uno players. The Piranha is at least a higher resolution than 2003’s PS2 EyeToy, though only because Sony under-utilized the camera of that accessory – a bit of custom firmware can bump it to the same resolution. These things are from twenty years ago.
To be clear, this isn’t a case of false advertising, or even underhanded marketing. All store descriptions of the cameras I’ve seen note that the camera resolution of one is 1080 and the other 480. The Hori camera is also £16 cheaper. If you read the small print, everyone has been quite up front about it all.
But it’s certainly a case of style over substance: the Nintendo camera is more expensive, less interesting looking, and is certainly ready for prime time in terms of whatever uses Nintendo has in mind for GameChat and camera-driven features. The Piranha Plant is cute as hell, cleverly designed, a conversation piece… and inherently comparatively rubbish in its primary purpose as a camera.
I’m not even sure that low resolution is going to be useful for many applications, at least based on the uses of the camera I saw at Switch 2 preview events, like Mario Party. How you can squeeze four people in front of it and have them depicted at any reasonable level of detail seems questionable to me. We don’t really know thanks to how Nintendo has launched the console without any major tentpole camera features, but I’m suspicious that something this low resolution might not be all that fit for purpose anyway, once the purpose fully arrives.
So consider this a PSA: skip this one. No matter how cute it is. If you desperately need the camera because you believe this is one of the Nintendo accessories that will be widely used and won’t fall by the wayside after a year or so, get the official one – or maybe another high-quality third party alternative, as the Switch 2 is theoretically compatible with a range of USB-C cameras. Sometimes you’ve got to skip out on the style and go for the substance. This is one such occasion.
The Piranha Camera was purchased by the author. Sadly.