If there’s one thing that has united all office workers during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s working from home, or WFH. This in turn has led to a massively increased usage of video communications tools, like Zoom or Teams. How else would you have your meetings? And if there’s one universal law in business, it’s that the amount of time spent in meetings always goes up.
WFH and Zoom made us realise how bad our laptop cameras are. Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash.
How much exactly has the usage of Zoom and Teams gone up during COVID-19? Well, Microsoft claims to now have 75m daily active users (DAUs) and Zoom, who initially claimed that their DAUs had jumped from 10m in December 2019 to 300m in April 2020 walked back those numbers a bit, specifying that they have “300m daily Zoom meeting participants” (which is not the same as DAUs). In any case, the growth has been insane and today Zoom’s valuation is $58bn. Compare that to Nordea Bank, the largest financial services group in Northern Europe, which has a market cap of around €30bn.
As soon as people started spending a big chunk of their WFH hours on Zoom and Teams, we started seeing a myriad of articles explaining how to look and sound as good as possible in virtual meetings. You know, make sure to have proper lighting and avoid backlight, have the camera at eyes height, and use earphones and a good microphone.
Despite fine-tuning, many noticed that the camera, often a 720p built-in laptop camera, is the bottleneck. The image quality leaves a lot to be desired and especially in low-light conditions the quality becomes outright bad. It wasn’t a big surprise that suddenly all external reasonably priced decent web cameras from Logitech and Microsoft were sold out.
Why are modern laptop cameras so bad? Why has there been so little improvement in 10 years? It seems like the camera is an area which, prior to COVID-19, was completely neglected by laptop manufacturers. When comparing the camera of my mid-2017 MacBook Pro to the camera of my mid-2012 MacBook Pro, the difference is negligible. According to Apple’s tech specs, both devices feature a 720p FaceTime HD camera (not sure if you can call 720p HD anymore), and yes the newer camera is slightly better in low-light conditions, but that’s it.
I can understand that given the thinness of a typical laptop lid, it’s hard to embed a high quality camera there, but this is clearly something that has to change. Comparing to what we have in the iPhone 11 Pro (as the front facing camera) and in the iPad Pro, the situation is intolerable from a laptop users perspective.
It’s safe to assume that the COVID-19 driven WFH trend will force manufacturers to improve the laptop cameras and I bet this is something that will be addressed and promoted when new laptop models are launched in the near future.
After all, who knows how long this pandemic will last, and even when it’s over, many will probably spend much more time zooming from home compared to pre-crisis times.