Seems like a good way to get a decent quality webcam as well. On Android at least you can use DroidCam to turn your connected device into a webcam. Surprisingly it even works on Linux:
I simply stuck two of them together: back to back. So there's three prongs facing down and three prongs facing up.
The downward prongs hook over the top of the monitor, and the upward prongs hold the phone. A bit of blu tack to absolutely make sure everything stays in place and remains level, and for the cost of the license (which is diddly squat) I've got a higher-quality streaming device than most of my colleagues that comes off my monitor whenever I need it to and has seen me through the pandemic.
Unfortunately, doesn't work for Macs. Not that Mac camera is bad, but this would have been usable as a better way to position the camera on to the external monitor using an old Android phone
Since apple is so proud of their ecosystem, I still can not understand, why I can not use an iPhone as a web cam for a Mac without third party software. Especially after one year of work from home.
While I'm not sure I'd call it "bad", the webcams on even the 2019 MBPs (last I've personally tried) were kind of overwhelmingly mediocre. The front and rear cameras on basically all the android phones I've used in 6 years are all much, much clearer than the mac's built in webcam.
I was kinda shocked to see how poor the MacBook camera was considering how good the front facing camera is on the iPhone. Then I realised that on the MacBook it only ever gets used for video calls which will get compressed to 200x150px while the iPhone front facing camera is mostly for selfies
Thank you very much, this is exactly the satisfactory solution I haven't found when I was looking for it before! I expected that the iPhones screen recording was only available in Quicktime and not for third-party apps like OBS. Going to try it out soon with an old iPhone 5, I hope it supports streaming video from the camera in the browser.
https://www.dev47apps.com/