Comment by einarfd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by einarfd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people complain about Zoom fatigue, and while on one hand I'm fairly happy that it is a competitors offering that has ended up with being a part of that moniker, and not the product I'm working on, it is somewhat unfair to blame Zoom or the software stack for that. The main culprit for messing up meetings are the cameras and the microphones on laptops. I'm not sure if there are any vendors at all, including Apple which is the laptop vendor I use, which has god quality camera and microphones on their kit. I'm lucky enough to work in a group where everyone has dedicated video conferencing kit, and this makes a big difference. The quality gap between someone on system with proper camera and microphones, and someone calling in on laptop is huge. I get that not everyone can go out and buy dedicated kit, and maybe the dedicated kit don't work with you video conferencing vendor. But getting the people you work with on a decent USB camera with inbuilt microphones, is something everyone should have a look at. The chances are high it will make your days more pleasant.

When It comes to five year olds doing schooling over video conferencing. I'm far from an expert on kids, I don't have kids and I don't want kids. But it does sound to me like a fools errand, and I'm super happy I'm not going to participate in that nightmare.

You can buy a top-of-the-line $3,000 16" Macbook Pro and it comes with a garbage-tier 720p webcam that has terrible dynamic range and low-light performance. It's embarrassing. Most Windows laptops at a third of the price have significantly better webcams.

I assume thinness is part of the problem--my high-end Logitech webcam is about an inch thick. Also webcam quality was probably just not much of a consideration until fairly recently.

But, even if someone doesn't more or less set up a studio as I've done to a degree and some of my colleagues have done, there are some pretty basic things related to lighting and webcam height that can be done pretty easily by most people. Though I'd add that comms problems are also a frequent annoyance and there's not a lot people can do there.

I'd add though that I normally move around my house when I'm working. Sitting at a desk all day in a "studio" doesn't really work for me.

iPhone cameras are pretty good and they're very thin. Front or back.

Yeah, if they put in any of the cameras from an iPhone (or any flagship smartphone for that matter) it would be an unbelievable leap in quality. There's no way they can't find space for it.

If you look at iFixit teardowns, even the front camera modules are practically the full thickness of the phone, which is much thicker than a MacBook lid.

Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.

Cameras are also a really big deal in the context of smartphones. I assume a lot of silicon is devoted to making them work well with a small sensor in a smallish footprint. Apple is probably not going to add a couple hundred dollars to a MacBook BOM (and maybe a bump for the lens) for a better webcam--at least they wouldn't have before the current situation. Who knows now? Maybe a top-notch webcam is a selling point. Many people still wouldn't set up lighting and eliminate backlighting to give it a chance.

A top notch camera is not "a couple hundred dollars" on a BOM. Google Pixel 4a costs $350 for the whole device and it has a great camera, more than enough to serve as a webcam.

You need a 2.1 MP camera to get 1080p, which the vast majority of laptop webcams don't do. The last time you could get a 2.1 MP main camera in any half decent phone was probably back in 2015. Laptop makers just didn't care, it wasn't a priority for most users before Covid.

Apple got over having a "camera bump" on their phones years ago. On laptops they have way more options--the most straightforward would be to put a matching notch in the bottom-case for when it closes.

Finally higher quality build-in cameras are being included in iMacs. I hope very soon they start making their way into their laptops.

The ultrabooks that are priced to compete with MacBooks have even worse webcams than Apple uses, because they have even thinner lids and bezels. It's not a question of cost, it's the result of physical laws and design priorities.

It is interesting that companies are willing to put massive, tumorous lumps and display cutouts on smartphones in the name of picture quality but not even a little bump on laptop lids.

It's pretty obvious why, people make buying decisions on phones based on the quality of the cameras, both the back camera and the "selfie" camera. They don't do that on laptops because historically whatever was there was good enough.

Am I going crazy or is the webcam in my 2012 macbook pro better than the new one?

My experience and my wife's have been that even where there is dedicated videoconferencing equipment (cameras, mics, lighting, ambient sound treatment), video calls are draining.

Yes, it's worse when people are using built-in cameras and bad lighting. But it's still there in 'good' conditions.

(To add to the list of things to get: use a wired connection! Wi-Fi is an endless source of lagginess and other problems. Get a USB ethernet dongle; 100Mbit is overkill. Also, get a LED lighting panel and tripod from a photo supply store so that people can see you.)

I'm sure better equipment and software helps, but there's all sorts of mostly unavoidable issues [1] that make a video call harder than meeting in person. If your school is replacing several hours a day of in person meeting with several hours a day of video calls, it's going to be awful.

You absolutely need to do things differently, but kindergarden is not going to work with look at the morning message, do tasks from a list, including watching some videos, and do a check-in call once or twice a week.

[1] like latency and a/v sync. You could get pretty low latency if everyone was on land lines and called into a conference hosted at the school. But, nobody has land lines, so we're doing audio with the video over the internet. So we have the delay for the encoder, we have delay to get a big enough packet to send over IP, we've got last mile network delay (I'm at 20 ms to get out of my provider's network), plus network delay to wherever the conference server is, plus processing time, and then all that on the way back. If you're on congested wifi because nobody runs wired ethernet anymore, but you've got two kids and two adults all having to do this, that ads inconsistent delay, so now you need a jitter buffer. That is a reminder to try to set up my kid with wired networking though, thanks.

I’ve been using ChromeOS tablet as my video conferencing rig with front firing speakers and good microphone array. No echo and no overheated MacBook Pro.

Suspect a newish iPad could work well too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com