Pretty simple: it's bad
Written: Jan 20 '01 (Updated Jan 20 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Price
Cons: Picture quality, software
The Bottom Line: Avoid this junk. Save for another month or so and purchase something you can actually use!
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| Dearmad's Full Review: IBM PC Camera Webcam |
There's no excuse for this bad a PC camera to so successful in the market except maybe that it's so cheap. In my case it was free, but...
The Hidden Cost
The software it comes with is wicked and must be installed in a precise order or you will run into some odd problems. The instructions it comes with cannot be faulted for not warning you, however if you take the option of not rebooting afterward because you would rather wait than use it right away, it will simply not work even when you reboot- it's probably something as simple as a temp file getting deleted rather than used to set the registry but it's serious enough to lock up your machine.
Picture
It bleaches colors significantly, and unless you are going to post-process them, expect things to look bland. Also, regardless of how well you focus using the tiny dial on the front, your pictures will remain significantly fuzzy due to the limitations of the compression codec IBM chose to allow the camera to use; a codec by the way which also seems to make unneccesarily large video files- 10 seconds of video should not be nearly 1MB when it is that blurry, faded, and choppy. I've made a lot of digital animations in more codecs and formats than this camera will ever know exists, and the quality of compression here is miserable.
One minor plus, because of the color bleaching thing, photos in darkened rooms work pretty well compared to some other DC's- this was designed in, I'd bet, as a lot of people work at the computers by the light of the monitor or very little more than that, so I have to give IBM a + in this area of thought- however, software adjustment to lighting would have been the correct solution.
The software
Not going to go much into this as it's all practically at the level of freeware and nearly useless (beyond the drivers). With a little hunting on the WEB you can turn up much better stuff, and, if you're observant, will notice other cameras out there which are better suited to nearly any task you want to use this one for. I cannot imagine the money saved to purchase this thing could ever be enough to make someone pleased with their decision to buy this.
Mine was free... I'm still removing it right after I write this review, and yes, I'm heartless enough to say if anyone wants it, I'll $ell it to ya! :o).
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Dearmad
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Location: Portland, OR
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 6 members
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