I've been working remotely since before it was cool, and one thing I wish more people paid attention to is meeting equipment. It's annoyingly common to join a remote meeting with someone on flaky WiFi, with a barely-understandable microphone, and a camera where they show up as a shadowy blob.

All of this is fixable, and if you work remotely it's worth spending a little bit of money to do it. Remote meetings where you can see and (more importantly) hear each other clearly are much nicer, and lead to more natural and collaborative conversations.

A home office desk with two monitors displaying nature scenes, a white circular key light and black webcam mounted on top of the left monitor, a Sennheiser gaming headset with boom microphone, split ergonomic keyboard, and blue-gray hexagonal acoustic panels on the wall behind the desk
My setup, with a gaming headset, monitor-mounted key light, and fancy webcam. Not pictured: A laptop dock with a wired internet connection. The hexagon panels allegedly reduce echoes but are mostly decorative.

Since the fundamentals of lighting and audio technology haven't changed in a long time, I'll mostly be giving ancient used suggestions to save money. There's probably nicer current-gen equipment if you go looking for it, but it's not really necessary.

Networking

Stop taking calls on crappy coffee shop WiFi networks. Just stop!

For a natural conversation, you need extremely low latency1 and for everything to transmit perfectly with no garbling2. WiFi performs poorly as the number of networks and devices in an area goes up, and public networks are rarely optimized for low-latency.

The best network option is to plug your laptop into ethernet wired directly to a fiber or cable modem. I do this when I'm working at my desk.

WiFi If You Must

Admittedly, this is annoying, so getting a high-quality WiFi router is also an option. There are two rules here:

  • Make sure your signal quality is good. Your connection quality symbol should be 100% maxed out. The farther you are from your router, the more easily interference can cause dropped packets and latency.
  • Do not chain WiFi routers. Every hop doubles (or more) your latency, and since WiFi is by far the worst part of the connection between two computers on the internet, increasing the amount of WiFi is very bad.
  • Use a 5 Ghz channel. 2.4 Ghz channels have longer range, but that also means that the amount of interference is unacceptable unless you live alone on a farm.

There are WiFi routers with range equivalent to multiple cheap routers chained together, so if you need long-range I recommend that. You can also set up multiple access points wired together if necessary.

Recommendation

I have a TP-Link AX60005 from 2020 (~$55 on ebay6), although it's likely overkill for most people (it's a relatively fancy WiFi 6 router). The bare minimum is a router that supports 802.11ac ("WiFi 5")7 and has sufficient range. WiFi 5 came out in 2013 so there are good deals to be had here if you don't care about the latest tech.

Headphones

Headphones make way more of a difference than you'd expect, especially your microphone. This is hard to notice since you usually don't hear yourself, but consider how hard it is to understand your coworkers sometimes. Your audio also sounds that bad to them.

The two things you're looking for to improve this are a high-quality microphone and a connection that doesn't ruin it. I'm not going to talk about playback quality on your side, since every headset on the market is good enough for meetings, and you'll know if you want audiophile-quality headphones.

Microphones

Most headset reviews don't talk about microphones, but the heuristic is that gaming headsets tend to have good microphones, since gamers care about their team mates being able to hear them well.

I recommend a headset with a microphone instead of a podcasting-style microphone. Bigger/fancier headphones are good for top-quality recording, and work much better if you need to pick up multiple people, but they're harder to set up. A microphone on your desk3 will loudly pick up typing, and they're less convenient if you want to move around.

One advantage of a separate mic is if you want to use bluetooth headphones: Bluetooth headsets are complete garbage, but in headphone-only mode they're fine.

Bluetooth Sucks

Bluetooth audio quality has improved a lot in the last decade, but unfortunately that's mostly unidirectional audio. The bidirectional codecs are a mess.

This means if you want to listen to music on bluetooth headphones, it will usually sound great, but once you enable your mic, sound quality will drop, and the quality of your microphone will sound terrible, no matter how good it is physically. Also, even "low latency" bluetooth codecs like AptX add 40+ ms of latency4.

Allegedly this has improved somewhat8 over the last few years, and if you're lucky you might be able to find a bluetooth headset + computer + operating system combination that uses a better bidirectional codec, but in my opinion it's still easier to use a wired headset. A wire also has no interference, so you'll get latency and quality which is impossible to achieve wirelessly.

Recommendation

A well-lit portrait showing a person wearing a black Sennheiser gaming headset with red accent rings and an adjustable boom microphone, pointing at the headset with their finger. The image demonstrates clear, natural skin tones and good exposure.
You could look as cool as me.

I have the Sennheiser EPOS Game ONE Gaming Headset9 that a previous employer10 bought me and then let me keep when I left. I bought mine in 2016, but it's a wired headset so nothing important has changed in headset technology since then. You can get these for $25 on ebay11 now.

My advice here is out of date, so there might be acceptable bluetooth headsets (assuming you pick based on compatibility with your OS), but I don't know what they are. Good luck if you look for that.

Lights

Finally, we get to the somewhat-less important things. Looking nice on a call is less important than being understood, but if you're going to be on calls all the time, it's worth improving your lighting. You can trick people into liking you more if you look nice.

The two main problems with video call lighting are:

  • You don't have any lights.
  • Your lights are in the wrong place.

Turn the Lights On

This costs nothing. Just turn the lights in your room on. Cameras need light to work.

Logitech C920 webcam capture showing a person in very poor lighting conditions. The face is heavily shadowed and barely visible, the image is blurry with visible noise, skin tones appear unnaturally pink/purple, and background details are almost completely obscured in darkness.
Logitech C920 capture in a dark room. Note the blur, the shadowed face, and the weird pinkish skin tone.

Your Lights Are In The Wrong Place

Unfortunately, room lights are usually in the wrong place to light your face. Ceiling lights point down (causing your face to be shadowed) and people usually don't put their desk directly against a window, so window light either causes the entire front of your body to be shadowed (if it's behind you) or to have harsh shadows from one side.

You can partially solve this with More Dakka12. I have 14,000 lumens of light around the ceiling in my office, so I actually look ok with just my ceiling lights.

Logitech C920 webcam capture with bright overhead ceiling lights. The face is visible with more natural skin tones compared to the dark room shot, but pronounced shadows remain under the eyes, nose, and chin, creating an unflattering appearance.
Logitech C920 capture lit from above with the power of 1/100th of a sun. Note the shadows around the eyes.

But I look even better if I add a light in front of me.

Logitech C920 webcam capture combining overhead ceiling lights with frontal lighting. The face is evenly illuminated with natural skin tones, minimal shadowing around the eyes and facial features, and significantly improved overall appearance compared to overhead-only lighting.
Mostly my eyes look prettier.

And it's even more drastic if you have bad room lighting.

Logitech C920 webcam capture using only a monitor-mounted key light with minimal room lighting. The face is well-lit and evenly illuminated with natural skin tones and no harsh shadows, demonstrating that a single properly-positioned light can produce good results.
Logitech C920 lit with just a light attached to my monitor (turned down since this webcam gets its contrast blown out really easily).

Any light that's not behind or above you will help. Putting a lamp in either corner of your room next to your desk will help. The best option is a key light mounted on your monitor, although you may find it annoying if you don't like light in your face.

Recommendation

I have the Elgato Key Light Neo13 ($50 on ebay14), although honestly it's overkill. Just put any light on or near your desk.

Camera

This is what prompted me to write this article. Surprisingly, almost all webcams are trash. The Logitech C92015 was most sites' top recommended webcam for years, and look at those pictures above. They're ok, but I wouldn't call them good. And that's a top rated webcam. Most webcams have tiny sensors and barely work better than the flip phone camera I had in high school.

That said, most webcams will look good enough if you have good lighting.

Logitech C920 webcam capture with optimal lighting from both room lights and a key light. The face is evenly lit with natural, accurate skin tones, sharp focus, and no visible shadows, representing the best image quality achievable with this webcam.
Logitech C920 with a well-lit room and a key light.
MacBook Pro built-in webcam capture with room lighting and a key light. While the face is adequately lit, the image has a noticeably warm/orange color cast, reduced sharpness, and lower overall quality compared to the dedicated Logitech C920 webcam captures.
Macbook Pro built-in webcam with a normally-lit room and a key light.

Recommendation

I swear Insta360 didn't pay me to write this, but their Insta360 Link16 webcam is just so good. Compare the "good shot" from the C920 with a shot by an Insta360 Link in the dark.

Insta360 Link webcam capture in a dark room with only dim window light. Despite poor lighting conditions, the face remains clearly visible with reasonable detail and sharpness, though skin tones show an unnatural pinkish cast. Significantly better performance than the Logitech C920 in similar low-light conditions.
Insta360 Link capture taken in the dark, lit only by a window with the blinds down.

Sure, my skin is still a weird pink tone, but that image is still surprisingly good. I had to dig my old C920 out for the lighting section because all of the examples looked fine with my new camera.

And if I actually give it some light to work with..

Insta360 Link webcam capture with proper room and key lighting. The image shows excellent quality with natural, accurate skin tones, sharp detail throughout, well-balanced exposure, and no color casts or artifacts. Represents the highest quality webcam capture among all examples shown.
Look at the pretty colors! And how I don't look dead!

This thing does cost $120 on ebay17 though, and it's not really that important, so if you're going to skip anything, skip this.

Some other options are:

  1. Whatever webcam you already have, if you have decent lighting.
  2. An old phone18 if you don't mind it being kind of annoying. Smart phones have much better sensors than most webcams, but they're bulky and more complicated to turn on.
  3. Technically you can use a spare DSLR as a webcam19 (and it looks really good), but if you're rich enough to have a DSLR just sitting around, you can probably just buy the Insta360 and save yourself a lot of effort.

Conclusion

Fix your WiFi, get a decent mic, and turn some lights on, and your coworkers will love you. Maybe get a fancy camera if you're vain like I am.

Then get back to work.

  1. One-way latency of 150 ms is "acceptable" on a call, in the sense that customers won't complain about it, but latency starts to impact the flow and interactive feel of a call before that point.

    I plan to write a whole post about this, but I'd target sub-100 ms latency for natural/interactive conversation, and I suspect there's further (smaller) benefits to latency reduction past that point.

    For comparison, musicians get thrown off by ~30 ms latency, and an in-person conversation has ~10 ms of latency. ↩

  2. The latency requirements for calls are too short to retransmit dropped packets, so any packet loss means loss of clarity.

    There are some tricks to fill in lost packets, but using them introduces more latency. ↩

  3. You can use a boom arm to fix this, but they're huge and get in the way. ↩

  4. AptX adds 40-60 ms of latency. The older SBC codec (which gets used surprisingly often) adds up to 200 ms of latency. ↩