Does 1080p vs 720p webcameras make a big difference for video conferencing?!

[Beorn_Bear]

Does 1080p vs 720p webcameras make a big difference for video conferencing?! Beyond the resolution scale, will it make a big difference when it comes to the overall experience in video conferencing?! Will background filters be better?! 

[JakeK9999999]

It really depends - Take a video on youtube of a face doing something and try to play it in both 720 and 1080. If 720 is too low for you than go for 1080p

 

If you have a large amount of people in your call then the application is not going to be displaying everyone's camera at the same resolution anyways

 

Overall - to me it does not matter - if you are going to be a main focus of other people in the video call than perhaps go for 1080 but it won't make the largest difference

[emosun]

resolution is really far down the list of things that make a camera good.

[Entropy.]

3 minutes ago, emosun said:

resolution is really far down the list of things that make a camera good.

Meh, up to a point at least. 

[Arika]

Given that most video conferences are with multiple people making each video smaller, no. If anything it will just use more bandwidth

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Beorn_Bear said:

Does 1080p vs 720p webcameras make a big difference for video conferencing?! Beyond the resolution scale, will it make a big difference when it comes to the overall experience in video conferencing?! Will background filters be better?! 

The camera resolution often doesn't matter unless you are doing lectures. If you're doing a lecture and have props or other objects you will need to show, then yes a YUV2 1080p or 4k webcam (USB3) is better than the typical 720p mjpeg (USB2) camera in laptops. However if you are actually in an environment where you were say, doing a TedX Talk or a lecture hall in a university, you would want someone to actually operate a camera on a tripod or steadycam.

 

If you are just having 3-24 people on the same call, it's often pointless to have a >720p camera because the stream will only switch to the person who is speaking, and everyone else will be reduced to 480p.

 

A 1-on-1 video conference will benefit from a higher resolution webcam (Eg an interview with someone, see some of the earlier pandemic late-night show's filler content before they set their hosts up with better equipment) , but unless someone is supposed to be reviewing or broadcasting it, there's not really a point to a higher resolution camera in these situations except to make it broadcast quality.

 

The thing that will affect the video conferencing experience the most is not the resolution but the latency. If mouths do not move with the audio, (which has to be manually adjusted on a per-call basis) it feels unnatural. This is why cameras that have hardware h264/mjpeg to reduce their bandwidth are often the worse options because the computer has to decode it and re-encode it to the streaming rate.