Once again I got suckered
Written: Jul 12 '00 (Updated Jul 12 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: software doesn't take much space, ease of installation
Cons: picture quality, video quality, video editing, video format (see review)
|
|
|
| grimace98's Full Review: IBM PC Camera Webcam |
Requirements (from the box): Windows 98 or Windows 2000, a USB-ready PC, a 166MHz Pentium processor or greater, 16MB of RAM and 8MB of hard drive space. For some reason it also says that this camera requires an "Internet ready PC". I don't understand why this is...
I don't know why I decided to pick up a PC/web camera. I guess I just wanted to take some pictures for my various webpages and just random stuff. Unfortunately, this plan backfired on me. I'm amazed to read the rest of the epinions and see how much everyone else seems to love this camera. I sure don't.
The IBM PC Camera is a PC/web camera actually manufactured and created by Xirlink, not IBM. It is capable of resolutions ranging from 176x144 to 352x288, and capable (in theory) of up to 30 frames per second. My experience has been, however, that it seems to be quite a bit under that frame rate. Whenever I try to record a movie, the motion seems completely blurry, and the motion on screen can take a second or more to actually catch up to real life.
I'll admit now that I also don't have a lot of experience actually using webcams, but I have seen the resolution of cameras my friends own and they seem better; capable of better video and better resolution pictures. The pictures I take, even at the maximum resolution of 352x288, seem terribly grainy and small. If you do have one, it seems to somehow help to have a big bright light right behind you or on whatever you're trying to take a picture of. I have a dim light in here, and it's an inconvenience for me to try to drag a big light in here to take pictures, so I do not include that in any way of my review and statements of the resolution.
The software is also very primitive. You cannot really edit anything with the included video editor, and the avi files the software creates cannot be played by the standard Windows Media Player (ie on other peoples' computers) without a special driver if you record at one of the special "IBM Mail" resolutions. The resolutions are so small and terrible that I don't see why you would want to do this anyway.
There are upsides to this camera; the small software footprint and ease of installation. The recommendations on the box say that only 8 megs of hard drive space are required, and the box is correct. This was actually the reason I purchased this camera, along with the price. Other cameras I were looking at were requiring 50 or even 140 megs of hard drive space; a precious commodity I don't have at the present.
The installation is very easy: simply install the software, turn off the comupter, plug in the USB cable and turn it back on. However, you must make sure and install the software first because I have seen horror stories of people who decided to install the camera and then the software. Big no no.
I paid 50 dollars for this camera at a major retail chain, with one of their infamous rebates (a 10 dollar one). Needless to say, I forgot to send it in and it expired, so I actually did end up paying the full 50 dollar price tag after all.
To conclude, if you can find this camera for very cheap and you're just looking for a simple little webcam that you won't be using for anything else, then by all means pick this camera up. However, if you're looking for something that you can use to take high-quality pictures for the web or to record video, then stay as far away from the IBM PC Camera as you can.
P.S. The picture in my member profile is an unaltered snapshot I took with this camera.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
grimace98
|
|
Member: Nathan Nance
Location: Oconee, IL
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 4 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.