I care enough to want to upgrade my work-issued Plantronics headset. Not enough to spend $500 doing so. $250? Possibly since it's a one-time investment, as long as there's a significant upgrade that can still be perceived in low bandwidth online meetings.
One thing I would like to avoid is the 'youtuber' setup. Ideally I'd like the microphone to be able to pick up my voice without it itself being in the camera view.
Fair. I'd prefer to call it the "Johnny Carson" setup, though!
Microphone placement is a massive subject by itself. The basic idea is that you make the signal loud by moving the microphone reasonably close to your voice and point it at your mouth, and simultaneously, the part that people forget, you put the microphone far away from noise sources and pointing away from them. This second part is what built-in laptop microphones are especially bad at. (Note that microphones have different pickup patterns, so pointing "away" from a source means different things to different mics, and it's irrelevant for omnidirectional mics.)
Depending on the camera set up, you can put something like an SM57 just out of frame and still have it be fairly close to your mouth, away from noise. A boom arm or mic stand will help. Setting your mic on the desk can work but this will pick up vibrations from the desk.
Other common setups are lavalier microphones, headset microphones, and shotgun microphones. Fair to assume you're not using a shotgun microphone.
Lav mics are simple and unobtrusive. TV hosts use them a lot. (You can see that late night TV hosts have a lav mic in addition to the desk mic... 99% of the time, you're hearing the lav mic, and the desk mic is off.) Headset mics give you more consistent and clear sound, with more freedom of movement, which is why singers and presenters use them a lot. Beware that cheap lav / headset mics will sound as bad as your laptop microphone, just with less background noise. You can watch reviews on YouTube for these kind of mics and decide if you want to try one out.
I'm almost convinced to get a real microphone(probably with a stand, for the time being). Doing some research on models now. The Johnny Carson setup may not be a big deal if most of the time the camera is off, but audio is important. And even then I might be able to keep it off frame. We'll see :)
I care enough to want to upgrade my work-issued Plantronics headset. Not enough to spend $500 doing so. $250? Possibly since it's a one-time investment, as long as there's a significant upgrade that can still be perceived in low bandwidth online meetings.
One thing I would like to avoid is the 'youtuber' setup. Ideally I'd like the microphone to be able to pick up my voice without it itself being in the camera view.