What camera did you end up with that had a narrow FOV?
I ended up getting Logitech Brio. It's expensive for a webcam, and honestly I'm a bit peeved - I don't feel I am getting my money's worth in terms of image quality. The software is also absolutely atrocious, so I don't really use it. But it is the best compromise of image quality and FOV that I could find.
(if your question was about DOF / bokeh/ blur, no webcam will do that and so far I haven't liked any software options. I just put a black collapsible photography background behind me so nothing but me is in the photo to begin with :)
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/software/...
I'm using it on my home computer and my work laptop, but don't want to install the software on the work laptop. So I must live with the extremely wide FOV there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/logitech/comments/nw17w1/brio_cam_w...
I was underwhelmed with the Brio but I eventually got used to it. It’s not the upgrade to the 920s I had imagined it to be but it’s good enough to keep.
And yes, I used Logitune to tune as much as I could. It was horrendous out of box.
Perhaps we've overestimated the need-gap[1] for good quality webcams? Most people seem to be just fine with mediocre webcams for that video call in which their video is anyways going to be compressed and resized to small window if there are multiple participants.
That doesn't mean I didn't waste my time in trying to build a better webcam like others here, I tried to convert a old point-and-shoot into a webcam using CHDK firmware but I couldn't find a way to get the video stream.
[1] 'Make entry level webcam better' - https://needgap.com/problems/185-make-entry-level-webcam-bet... (Disclosure: I run this problem validation forum)
Edited to add: Meant Narrow DOF when writing this, but both are true if you sit close to it!
If you expect someone to sit for 8 hours a day give them a good chair lest they start having back issues after two months of employment.
My other thought is that the suggested lens can stop down to f1.8, which would give a nice narrow depth of field (DOF) and add a pleasant background blur, but it would also be harder to stay in focus during a call. If the person on camera moves forward or backward very much at all when the lens is at f1.8, they would be pretty blurry. So perhaps they could get away with a lens that just stops down to f2.8 or so, albeit with worse low-light performance (smaller aperture, less light coming through).
But take these comments with a grain of salt. It sounds like you have a setup that works well for you.
In any case I find if you sit close to your camera, 35mm is a good FOV that will fit in your head and shoulders. The background blur for f/1.8 works well if you enable Servo Autofocus with Face Detect. It will momentarily get confused if you step out of the frame and back in again, but it can track a face pretty well after that.
On full frame I used 85mm 1.8 to get a a good FOV / DOF / proportions.
But it sat on a tripod 1.5 meters behind my computer and made the room a nightmare to navigate :D
35mm on FF would indeed be mildly wide (just on wide side of "normal" 50mm lens)
That said, even the greatest autofocus isn't going to be able to keep up with a person who moves around a lot at f/1.8 - so it's reasonable to stop down a bit if that's the case for your subject.
The mirrorless EOS camera's (R series) have autofocus with face tracking which works quite well. At f1.8 you get 8cm depth of field at 1m distance so you'd have to stop down the aperture to about f4 if you want your whole head to appear sharp on video.