My existing Sony one is 5 years old, and has done sterling service. Plus it's designed to clip on a notebook screen, so using a USB 1.1 device through a 1.1 USB extension cable into a USB 2 hub, combined with my crummy graphics card, means the picture is rubbish compared with what my brother gets from the built-in cam on his Macbook. The fact that the only chat program we could find that would work cross-platform was Yahoo! Messenger (MSN Messenger cam still doesn't work 'twixt PC and Mac, and AOL IM insisted that a firewall was blocking it) didn't help.
But it's so confusing! All the products available. . . I don't know what to look for. A trawl of the pcworld.co.uk (under PC peripherals, Webcams, wired) site produces 25 results: Logitech, Creative, Microsoft Lifecam, Philips, and Advent.
What features do I want? Built-in microphone isn't necessarily essential since I got a nice one for a Father's Day present this year. The only other experience I have with webcams is a Creative one that we used where I worked for hidden security camera, and had a motion-detector that quite impressed me - but, again, not really an essential feature.
I've seen some quite impressive (quality-wise) webcam footage on YouTube and, er, other places. I guess I'm looking for something that'll produce that sort of quality. Any suggestions?
(I won't necessarily buy it from PC World, either, it's just that my preferred supplier ebuyer.com is blocked at work)
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I've long since given up on making sense on our web-access policy. Now I CAN view ebuyer.com - this is the one I'm thinking of. . . http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/100897 Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
I didn't click the link but is that 'eye-tracking' webcam still "cool" - I remember seeing a demonstration video on either google video or youtube a few months ago. Looked interesting.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :