Bulbs & Fittings Ideas

I should first say, beware of too much of rave reviews… always suspicious. Especially from people who only have 2 reviews in their profiles…

This little cam didn’t look so bad at first. The look and feel is very boxy, so it’s not the prettiest out there, but I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t know what the other guy was testing, but this doesn’t shed light compared to a logitech or to the IPEVO pov webcam. Maybe a little below a creative.
The light may have seemed fine to him, but I did testing in different conditions: indirect sunlight, direct sunlight (partial on my face, then all of me), bulb light, office light, and rainy day light.
Conclusion: this camera is no good on contrast ratio and movement. The second you move, everything gets choppy. When you change lighting, let’s say from natural light to office light, the white balance is slightly off.
The night vision: it’s outperforming a creative and others, but honestly, it’s not like it’s crystal clear. After thinking about why I bought it, I thought, do you really want to be staring at your monitor for a long time in low lighting?? that’s very bad for your eyes.
The microphone: obviously unidirectional. You’re in front of it, and the sound is ok-ish, but you move 3 feet diagonally, and the other person can barely, very barely here you.

Overall conclusion: there are better values out there.

I bought one of these last week. I loaded the drivers and software without a problem. The software that came with is minimally useful, I mainly used it for testing the camera.

The picture quality is OK. Its not outstanding, but for the price, its decent.

It worked great in normal daylight indoors and at night with normal room lighting. The picture was clear. I used it with MSN chat and the other party could see and hear me clearly.

At night, in the dark, it worked beautifully. I had all the lights off. Just me and the light from a laptop LCD. When I viewed myself, the picture was clear. When I viewed the rest of the darkened room, the picture was VERY clear. It worked best when I switched to black and white mode. I could see the cat walking in the hallway with no visible light at all. I put in in the window and very clearly viewed the trees and other objects outside that I couldn’t even see with my naked eye.

The camera has LED’s on it and it works very well in low light conditions, but best in black and white mode.

The only drawbacks are the microphone and the LED’s. The microphone is crap. Doesn’t work very well at all. Not much more to say about that.

You can’t shut off the LED’s in low light mode. They function automatically. This would not be a problem for most people. The LED’s themselves emit only a dim red light in darkness, but rendered the camera useless for my software experiment which requires light from only 1 source. I couldn’t shut off the LED’s short of covering them up with tape. Then there was a grid pattern on the image.

I was unable to use the camera for my software experiment, but it works fine for everyday use. I used it in conjunction with a cheap microscope to get decent pictures of some small objects. Very nice.

Overall, I’m happy with the purchase. Especially for night vision.

Not bad but not great. Decent.

I would’nt really pay attention to the other negitive comments before this one. This is a really good webcam despite the fact that the frames per second are a bit slow at times. Now if you are looking for a high quality webcam then this is not the webcam for you, but if you are a poor student like me who wants a basic webcam with a built in mircophone to video chat with far away family and friends at a good price, then i would strongly recomend this camera.