In order to have nice bokeh (a function of the aperture of the lens), you also need to have a shallow enough depth of field at a fairly close range. As the sen

In order to have nice bokeh (a function of the aperture of the lens), you also need to have a shallow enough depth of field at a fairly close range. As the sensor gets smaller, and the field of view remains constant, the depth of field increases and so the opportunity for bokeh disappears. For pleasant bokeh in a video call, you're going to need a larger sensor than the ones used in camera phones or laptop screens - probably significantly so. Additionally, the lens is going to be quite a bit larger to have good illumination across the entire sensor. From a cost perspective, the cost of the sensor has to do with the yield of the wafer. It costs about the same to make a wafer no matter what you put on it (with certain caveats of the complexity of what you put on it). https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/53826/why-does-increasing-sensor-size-necessarily-lead-to-lower-silicon-wafer-utilizat https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/53826/why-does-inc... If you're working from a full frame sensor, you can at best fit 24x 24mmx36mm chips on a standard 8" wafer. Going to a 13.2mm x 8.8mm sensor you can put 244 of them on the same wafer. Then there's the yield on top of that which further reduces it. This gets it to the point where "to have a nice depth of field for a video call, you're going to need a camera that has similar costs and dimensions of a good digital camera." Adding that to a phone or laptop screen isn't possible. That said, I wouldn't be unhappy to find an affordable usb capable video camera with a nice lens on it (and maybe paired with a ring light or off axis hot lights)... but that's probably easily in the $300-$400 range.