Not entirely sure if this was meant as satire, but in case it wasn't: If I wanted to be judged on my physical looks or the quality in which those are presented to others over the wire, I would have been working in the film industry.
Genuinely believe a loss in fidelity moves us from acceptable telepresence to uncanny valley.
Landlines had exceptional fidelity and let one pick up the nuance of a person's emotional state. Today's cellular connections not so much. Thankfully things like Apple Facetime (audio only) recapture some of that.
Likewise with a high quality webcam I think it's important to treat your coworkers with respect by giving them the grace of seeing your body language in high resolution if you're going to opt out of physical meetings. Remote work is fine, just don't phone it in with the equivalent of 2000's era potato camera.
I agree in that improved audiovisual quality would be beneficial, but, at least for regular video calls, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect for people to go out of their way to do better than the quality their (not too old) laptop provides - not past ensuring they're in a reasonably quiet environment with halfway decent lighting anyway.
Besides, recent generations of laptops are finally shifting to better quality webcams and microphones. We'll get to where we'd both like it to be, eventually :)
I intentionally scale down my video as I don't want to be seen. Being on video requires a lot of cognitive effort, which I'd rather conserve to do actual work.
I grew up in similar times. What am I noticing is that only one model of cellphone (no adv) can give me a decent sound of my companion. But I did not have that mis-experience using very old phones.
Interesting, I'm curious, what phone/carrier was that? If you were able to get a decent sound on one phone, it sounds like then there's nothing intrinsically/insurmountably wrong with cell phones.
