20 years old and currently studying computer science at The University Of Warwick. Interested in gen...
20 years old and currently studying computer science at The University Of Warwick. Interested in general computing, tennis, movies and computer games.
Member since:27.04.2004
Reviews:7
Members who trust:1
At around £20, The Logitech Quickcam Express is one of the cheapest webcams on the market , and in this case you truly get what you pay for. Image quality and lighting levels are very poor and the camera is big (for a webcam), bulky and difficult to arrange properly on its stand. My girlfriend bought this camera to use with her laptop, but the quality was so bad that she soon got a Creative one instead.
Technology:
The main feature of the camera is obviously the CMOS sensor which delivers the image. The box states that this webcam can display
images at 640x480 resolution, but this isn't really true - the sensor is only capable of capturing images at 320x240, which are then scaled up by software. Essentially, this is like enlarging a small picture by a factor of two in Paint or Photoshop - the quality is greatly reduced at the larger size. It is unfair to advertise that this camera functions at 640x480 resolution because in reality it doesn't give images anywhere near the quality of my true 640x480 Creative Webcam Pro (which can software-hack images up to 1024x768, but it doesn't advertise itself as being a 1024x768 camera). In terms of real use, the image looks very bad on "Large" size in MSN Messenger, but is passable on "Medium". However, the image is fuzzy, occasionally displaying odd purple lines, and the lighting and colours are way off no matter what settings you choose.
The camera is very easy to install and connects to any USB port, although connecting the camera before installing the software can sometimes cause problems.
Features:
This is a very basic camera. There is no zoom function or any real features to speak of other than the fact that it takes photos and videos. There's a single button on top of the camera that can be pressed to take a photo, but it's unlikely that you'd use it anyway as it would be easier to pose for pictures by usng the mouse to click on a button in the software provided. You can also rotate the blue bit around the lens to focus the camera, but you probably won't need to as it focussed OK out of the box.
On the plus side, you can fiddle around with almost every aspect of the picture - contrast, hue, brightness, backlight, flicker elimination etc. but it's all rather useless really because it's impossible to get a good quality picture whatever settings you have.
The software is pretty good and does it's job well. There's the usual stuff you'd expect from a webcam - facilities to take video clips and pictures and put them in virtual albums etc. and it's all easy to install, configure and use. You won't get anything special at this price though.
Ergonomics / Aesthetics:
The camera is basically a big white ball on a stand. It doesn't look too bad overall, but it's big for a webcam and pretty heavy too. On a desktop it would be OK, but it's not good with a laptop unless you have something to stand it on and you don't mind carrying a farily big thing around with you. It's also a nightmare to position on the stand, which is very stiff and only allows slight movements of the camera. I also found that the button on the top is very responsive to the touch and is too easy to accidently press. While setting the camera up I accidently pressed it about 10 times, and each time it took an unwanted photo.
The plastic body and stand are quite susceptable to scratches and marks too. We wanted to return this webcam but the shop wouldn't take it back because the stand was scratched and marked with black lines. I don't know how it happened, but it must have happened in the space of one day.
Conclusion:
It is simply not worth wasting money on this webcam. True, it may be cheap, but I've seen webcams that come free with printers, computers etc. that are of better quality than this. There are plenty of alternatives on the market, and I personally recommend Creative Webcams. I would be wary of any other Logitech webcams due to the false claims on the box of this one - make absolutely sure you know what you are buying.
Chris Swan
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May 22nd, 2004
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