As promised, an update. First off

This Phoenix Audio mic looks pretty good — for $15.

yeah, it’s junk. Probably better than the microphones built into a lot of laptops, but compared to conferencing systems — even compared to the mics built into, say, the Microsoft LifeCam series of cameras — it’s ‘way substandard.

Bright side: the microphone array in that InFocus conference camera is quite good. Enterprise-grade, even. I’ve now started looking at ‘obsolete’ enterprise-grade ‘beamforming’ microphones. Gotta love it when corporations move to the newest thing and their old stuff goes off-lease.

The video from that Vaddio ConferenceShot 10 is very good. It can stream both via USB and network — but the network stream is in rtsp format, so not useful to a lot of conferencing apps that run on windows. Everything else went together as I’d hoped. The camera can do 1080x30 or 720x60. Zoom doesn’t seem to use anything past 720, so that’s fine

The camera, including base and pan/tilt motors, is a couple of pounds. I was a bit shy about mounting it on top of the center speaker over our living room TV, so I got a wall mount from B&H.

As a side note, B&H is in NYC, and, AFAIK, is run by Hassidic Jews. I’ve read that that community in NYC has been hard hit. Buuut… a box with that mount was on my porch the. next. day. Color me impressed.