Who would you prefer doing daily standups or long stretches of remote pair programming with?

The one with the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is?

Or the one with sharp features, pleasant colour rendition, high resolution, and maybe even a pretty bokeh in the background?

Humans love pretty pictures. See OKCupids[1] image analysis vs attractiveness for example. Shallow DOF = More attractive.

See also hanselman's[2] thoughts on the matter of having a high quality setup for remote work.

[1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/dont-be-ugly-by-accident-b378f26... [2]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/GoodBetterBestCreatingTheUlti...

Neither. We usually turn the cameras off to hide the fact that none of us got dressed that morning.

We turn all that off because inevitably someone starts saying: I can't hear you guys, it's coming in robot voice, can you turn off the screen/video share?

It sounds like they don't have adequate internet to be working from home.

From home? I'm trying to work from whatever airport I am at. Video isn't that important but solid audio really is needed.

>the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is?

This is totally disingenuous. We're not comparing a 120p camera to a 1080p camera. We're comparing a sharp camera with great color rendition to a slightly higher resolution of the same camera.

Slightly offtopic - are there any webcams out there that can provide a shallow depth of field in realtime?

You can use a Black Magic Design Web Presenter which allows connecting 2 pro camera/lens setups via HDMI/SDI, and XLR mic inputs. It shows up as a USB webcam like normal.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicwebprese...

You can turn a Canon/Nikon DSLR into a webcam. Using SparkoCam.

So theoretically you can get a cheap old T3i + 50mm/1.8 and have a crazy good webcam with near-cinematic quality.

I was very excited by the idea. Ironically, it's only available on Windows.

You can do that on Linux too:

    modprobe v4l2loopback
    gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video0

Not any good one that does it in hardware out of the box that I know of. There are mod kits for CS lenses for c920/930/brio, if you can live with a tighter shot. If you've an compatible RX100/A6000 or similar laying around, then an Elgato Cam Link like hanselman's setup above might be the easiest option.

https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/cam-link-4k (1/5 the price of the blackmagic device above/below)

There's also some software "solutions", but I've no idea how good they are, probably not iPhone portrait mode quality.

I think the issue is that in most cases the problem isn’t the webcam, it’s the network that is carrying the stream.

Fair question, and I think yes! If you mainly do your meetings remotely (which I do), you want your interactions to be as high-bandwidth as possible.

There is value, and data, in real world interactions that is lost quickly in video calls. The lower latency, the higher the resolution and quality of the audio, the more you approximate a 'real' meeting.

This is way beyond baseline requirements for e.g. remote work, but it's _nice_, just as a slightly bigger screen is _nice_.

When doing conference calls with clients and vendors. We have high quality cameras in our conference rooms for a reason.

This is for audio, not video, as it's my "thing", but for the past year I've been doing all my video interviews with a Shure SM57 mic plugged into a nice preamp, into a good interface, and they've all gone much better than phone interviews. No one's ever said "wait, could you repeat that?" or "You're breaking up a bit". There's something to be said for smoothing out conferencing so it makes it more lifelike, and I'd assume that's even more true for video.

Or put another way, can you find any high-profile Twitch streamers using their integrated webcam/mic?