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...

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?