Chin up, kids, and mind the webcam: Honor lifts lid on MagicBook 14-inch and 15.6-inch laptops Honor, the youth-focused subsidiary of the embattled Chinese tech giant Huawei, today unveiled its latest MagicBook laptops at CES. The latest generation MagicBook comes in two variants — a smaller 14-inch laptop, and a full-sized 15.6-inch workstation. Both machines are powered by AMD's previous-generation Ryzen platforms, …
An issue common on many TV interviews via Skype. So many people never think of standing their laptop on top of a pile of books, or something, anything would be better than staring up their nostrils so you can count their nose hairs and checkout their nasal hygiene for boogers.
Going off-topic a bit but your comment about people giving TV interviews by Skype reminded me of something.... why do people doing interviews like that so often wear headphones?
I've never had any problems using Skype (or other videoconferencing tools for that matter) with the sound coming out of my PC speakers. The software's clever enough to manage to audio so that it doesn't descend into some howl of feedback reminiscent of Hendrix at Monterrey.
Why not just use speakers and ditch the earbuds, instead of appearing live to millions of people with bits of wire hanging out of your bonce?
The sound is a lot better when being picked up in front of your mouth. If you'd use a static mike, turning the head and such things would influence the sound negatively.
As for the headphones, you need them to exclude external sounds. Otherwise, when an ambulance runs by, you won't understand the other side.
I don't use skype itself but when using other video calling stuff I've always found that within obvious practical limits it's better to have your microphone closer to your mouth than your legs.
Many laptops aren't that good at isolating the sound of key presses and mouse clicks from their built in microphones either.
While I agree, the few inches further down won't make much of a difference.
The optimal solution would be a "retractable camera with a cable". You could pull it out and clip it to somewhere above. 1 m of cable would suffice. Then again, you can really buy those things cheep already, so why bother.
How long before someone sells puts out a press release trying to sell a drone with a camera, which is specifically designed to take video of you from a more flattering angle during video-conferencing (etc)? You start up a skype call, and it whirs into life and hovers about a meter away, just above your eyeline.
You could probably power it purely from a USB port because it would never need to fly more than a few meters, although everyone wants wireless everything these days.
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