Nice picture - everything else is awful
Written: Jul 26 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The camera's picture is excellent.
Cons: Customer satisfaction is unimportant to them.
The Bottom Line: The ads for this camera are full of BS! Toshiba's regard for customer satisfaction is very poor. Their tech support is even poorer.
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| mfattori's Full Review: Toshiba IK-WB11A Webcam |
I bought this camera based on reviews that I had read. I set it up and it mostly worked. The picture was excellent - but it is certainly a bandwidth intensive device. After a couple of days of use I noticed that if I faced it out a window, every 5 or 10 seconds it would 'Flash' white and then go black, and then return to normal. I called tech support (20 -30 minutes on hold) who said it was a known problem and gave me an authorization # to return the camera to the factory. It cost me about $40 to ship it back (with insurance). The support folks said the turnaround would be about 1 day. A couple weeks after sending it back I still had heard nothing and so I called tech support again (another 30 minutes on hold). This time they said they did not know where the camera was or when it would be shipped back. Eventually I got the camera back. It arrived COD! I had to pay to have it shipped, and then paid to get it back. The tech support folks are as one would expect - pretty useless.
Oh, and another thing... although the camera is advertised as producing 30 frames/sec (small frames), in reality I could not get anything close to that with the Java applet in a browser. Even with the camera connected directly to my computer over a wired Ethernet connection I could get maybe 3 or 4 frames a second (at 320 X 240). On the tiniest picture (postage stamp size) with maximum compression I could get maybe 10 frames second - but it was so small the picture looked like a little 'blob'. When I mentioned the slow frame rate to tech support they said that the camera puts out 30 frames a second but no browser would be capable of rendering that many frames in a second. They suggested that I purchase an additional piece of software for another $50 (Netcam software) and that would do the job. I took their advice and did buy it. The netcam software is even slower. On a direct wire 100 MB Ethernet connection to my PC the best frame rate I can get on a 320 X 240 picture is about 1 frame/second.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
mfattori
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Reviews written: 2
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