1 LOOK MORE PROFESSIONAL WITH A DECENT WEBCAM
The built-in webcam on your laptop or iPad will suffice for most casual work meetings, but the quality is usually quite poor — it’s often the visual equivalent of being on a dodgy phone line. And if you have a desktop PC, there’s often no webcam at all.
There’s lots of choice here. A decent quality budget model is
Ausdom’s AW635 (€70 from Amazon.co.uk). This is a ‘plug-andplay’ model that is pretty easy to use. It gives you ‘full HD’ (1080p), which is realistically as much as you want for just about any video call. It has a proper glass lens with an f2.0 aperture, which means it’s somewhat decent in low light.
If you want to ramp up the quality even further, Logitech’s Pro C920
(€120 from retailers) is excellent. The 1080p picture quality from it is strong and consistent enough to ameliorate relatively dodgy lighting conditions. It also has really decent autofocus, meaning that if you shift around a bit, you won’t suddenly become a blur. It also has a reasonably competent microphone built in that’s very likely to be better than the one in your laptop or PC.
At the top of the office worker’s webcam market is Logitech’s Brio 4K model (€200 from retailers). Not only does it show you ultra high definition, its microphones pick you up expertly too.
All that said, my own setup is a notch above those webcams, but is very pricey for someone starting from scratch. I use my own DSLR camera, plugged into my laptop.
Mine is a Canon (Eos RP, around €1,400), but most of the main camera brands — Canon, Nikon and Sony among them — now offer free software to let you do the same if you have a standalone camera. The advantage is that the camera’s lens is even better than any webcam you can buy and that is obvious from the picture on your screen.