Can it get worse than this?
Written: Nov 30 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Small, lightweight, clips to notebook.
Cons: Horrible image quality rendering it useless for anything.
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| payman's Full Review: Archived Computer Hardware Reviews |
IBM should be ashamed. The Xirlink IBM PC camera's picture quality is so horrible, so poor, and so useless, I would not pay $5.00 for it. I did pay a full $50: $30 after rebate, before returning it after 24 hours and forgetting about the rebate.
Could it be that IBM engineers didn't check the camera's performance before putting their name and logo on it? Could it be that they actually think the camera's image quality is good!?
The camera's images are washed out and fuzzy. Color? HA! What a joke - you will see almost black and white. Detail? HA! Another big joke. So fuzzy you won't be able to make out what is in the image - is it my face, or a giant potato? Worksmanship? HA! Try focusing the camera with its stuck tiny focusing ring (and don't use pliers!).
On paper everything looks good: 24 bit color, and typical max 320 by 240 pixel resolution. But reality is a different story.
On the positive side, if there is any, the camera is very small and good for travel, and comes with a clip to attach to the edge of a notebook screen. Setup is trivial: install the software from CD, and connect the camera next. You can also manually set frames/sec from 5 to 30 fps. And finally the camera also has a snapshot button so that you can enter your so called photo in "America's fuzziest home webcam photos".
The software is basic - a video email program supporting compression, but no video or image editing software, or any package to facilitate any web work. On the images you can only control brightness and contrast.
In short: this is a crummy camera; a real piece of junk. Stay away from it at any price unless you are absolutely desperate for getting a puny sized camera to take it along with you, and don't care at all about image quality.
Save your money and get anything besides this - it is bound to be better than this camera!
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
payman
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 4 members
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