Creative Live! Cam Optia

I bought this webcam from amazon in December 06 and was really pleased with it. You can use it either with a standard desktop or clip it onto a notebook/flatscreen monitor with the rubberised clamp which i find useful as i can look at the screen/into the camera at the same time. The camera itself has a glass lense and a manual focus by twisting the silver ring on the front of the camera, the camera can tilt or swivel up and down but unfortunatly ...
...would have been a good simple improvement. The cable is about 1.5m long which i found for a laptop can be a bit annoying but i guess for a desktop it would be useful and there is a velcro cable strap attached anyway so it isn't too much of a bother. One handy function is that when the camera is swiveled all the way down it cuts the video which i found useful if you want privacy for a few minutes. This camera is plug and play at least on the systems ... more

I bought this webcam from amazon in December 06 and was really pleased with it. You can use it either with a standard desktop or clip it onto a notebook/flatscreen monitor with the rubberised clamp which i find useful as i can look at the screen/into the camera at the same time. The camera itself has a glass lense and a manual focus by twisting the silver ring on the front of the camera, the camera can tilt or swivel up and down but unfortunatly there is no side to side rotation which i think would have been a good simple improvement. The cable is about 1.5m long which i found for a laptop can be a bit annoying but i guess for a desktop it would be useful and there is a velcro cable strap attached anyway so it isn't too much of a bother. One handy function is that when the camera is swiveled all the way down it cuts the video which i found useful if you want privacy for a few minutes. This camera is plug and play at least on the systems i've used it on (1 HP pavilion laptop with AMD athlon 64bit 3200 processor, 512Mb ram 40Gb HDD and 1 Dell inspiron 640m with pentium dual core 1.7Ghz, 1Gb ram, 80Gb HDD Both with XP home service pack 2 and USB 2.0 ports). The software included with the optia is quite good as well with several features including photo capture, video recording, motion detection, remote monitoring and time lapse video. The photo capture is pretty normal with some fun added with various effects that can be added (masks, hats glasses, mirror image liquid etc i did have some fun with these when i first got my optia) the video recording function has a highest quality setting of 640x480 which is ok for video chat but not really that useful for recording video and can again use the special effects. The motion detection i found quite useful as i ssometimes use it to 'watch' my room when i'm at university and has the ability to email pictures to your email account when motion is detected(so even if your computer is stolen you can still catch the person who did it), you can adjust the area that is monitored as well as the sensitivty so if you just want to monitor a particular section of the image for very slight movement you can do that or look for general movement that covers the whole image or anywhere in between. i haven't persnoally used the remote monitoring but it can be used to upload images/video to a webpage/ftp. Finally the time lapse video is quite a nice function to have you can set everything you might need including the time interval, how long it should record for, whether you want to time/date stamp each image and the frames per second you want the output video to run at. I used the time lapse to record the sunrise but unfortunatly the white balance wasn't quite up to the job but indoors it is great. The optia also has automatic face tracking which i thought sounded great but it turns out it means it uses a digital zoom which zooms in and tracks the face while the camera actually stays still but useful anyway. Taking everything into account i think this is a great webcam although there are newer models with autofocus, the picture quality is good its compact and looks great. Some improvements could be made such as side to side rotation and shorted cable but thats only because i use it with a laptop and there is a lot of excess cable but is probably ideal for a desktop. 

...less