Creative Live! Cam Optia AF

If you're a frequent user of a web cam, then this is the kind of camera you should be thinking of getting. The camera has a whole lot of features, looks great, has excellent build-quality and the pictures it produces are nothing short of excellent.

O.k, lets go in to some detail.

The camera is jet black and sits on a clear stand. You can swivel the camera up and down by up to 270°. You can even move it slightly left ...
...or when its capturing an image a funky blew LED light comes on around the left side of the camera. This one of the main things I really loved about this camera. It looked fantastic.

The web cam comes with two built in microphones giving you brilliant background noise cancellation. You are able to turn the noise reduction off and you can also add effects to your voice. Which is good if you want to hide you identity or just simply have ... more

If you're a frequent user of a web cam, then this is the kind of camera you should be thinking of getting. The camera has a whole lot of features, looks great, has excellent build-quality and the pictures it produces are nothing short of excellent.

O.k, lets go in to some detail.

The camera is jet black and sits on a clear stand. You can swivel the camera up and down by up to 270°. You can even move it slightly left to right. When the camera is plugged in via USB or when its capturing an image a funky blew LED light comes on around the left side of the camera. This one of the main things I really loved about this camera. It looked fantastic.

The web cam comes with two built in microphones giving you brilliant background noise cancellation. You are able to turn the noise reduction off and you can also add effects to your voice. Which is good if you want to hide you identity or just simply have a bit of fun.

The camera also comes with auto focus and a privacy mode. You move the camera so the lens points downwards and slots into the stand deactivating it. You don't have to quit the software. You can adjust contrast and colour and swap between the auto and manual focus. You can add effects to your face. Things like funny hats, glasses and so on. You also get a feature called Smart Face Tracking. It tracks your movements around the screen to keep your face constantly in the video frame. This didn't work to well for me though. I always got a slight blur.

In photo capture mode you get great 8 mega pixel images ranging from 3200 x 2400 down to a smaller 320 x 240. Like most cameras you also get a timer so you can get yourself ready for a picture. Videos also come out on top. But make sure you have sorting out all your lighting settings first.

The camera isn't perfect. I found you still got a slight delay when moving around in front of the camera. The auto focus is slightly annoying. It takes a while to work out the correct setting, if you're moving around a lot it's going to look like your always in and out of focus as it trys to keep track of you.

As I said before if you're a frequent user of web cams then this a good all round camera to have. The price isn't to bad either. You get good quality images and videos and it's very easy to use. 

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