Creative Live! Cam Optia

Advantages: good performance, good appearance
Disadvantages: none

For many people, also for me, the most items when they get online are connecting with their friends or somebody else. They can use e-mail system or some active online software like MSN. You can type in your words into the box and so you can send it to the other side, then your friends can see what you want to say. And also, you can use your microphone to input your words. Have you ever used a webcam to see your net pal. And this cam is my important ... Read review

Advantages good picture qualtiy, lots of feature included with software and looks great
Disadvantages Lack of side to side adjustment, cable too long laptop use

...found useful if you want privacy for a few minutes. This camera is plug and play at least on the systems i've used it on (1 HP pavilion laptop with AMD athlon 64bit 3200 processor, 512Mb ram 40Gb HDD and 1 Dell inspiron 640m with pentium dual core 1.7Ghz, 1Gb ram, 80Gb HDD Both with XP home service pack 2 and USB 2.0 ports). The software included with the optia is quite good as well with several features including photo capture, video recording, motion detection, remote monitoring and time lapse video. The photo capture is pretty normal with some fun added with various effects that can be added (masks, hats glasses, mirror image liquid etc i did have some fun with these when i first got my optia) the video recording function has a highest quality setting of 640x480 which is ok for video chat but not really that useful for recording video... Read review

Advantages picture quality
Disadvantages delay

...If you're a frequent user of a web cam, then this is the kind of camera you should be thinking of getting. The camera has a whole lot of features, looks great, has excellent build-quality and the pictures it produces are nothing short of excellent. O.k, lets go in to some detail. The camera is jet black and sits on a clear stand. You can swivel the camera up and down by up to 270°. You can even move it slightly left to right. When the camera is plugged in via USB or when its capturing an image a funky blew LED light comes on around the left side of the camera. This one of the main things I really loved about this camera. It looked fantastic. The web cam comes with two built in microphones giving you brilliant background noise cancellation. You are able to turn the noise reduction off and you can also add effects to your voice... Read review