| Creative Live! Cam Optia | 
| Brand: Creative
Category: CE
Buy New: £16.99
New (14) Refurbished (1) from £16.99
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 2949
Platform: Windows Xp
Media: Electronics
Fragile: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 0.4 x 0.4 x 0.4
Legal Disclaimer: Layer One UK does not offer any warranty other than the one imposed by the manufacturer. Consequently, the warranty conditions proposed by Layer One UK will be an exact copy of the manufacturers.
MPN: 73VF027000004
Model: 73VF027000004
EAN: 5390660131356
ASIN: B000KVZN3S
Release Date: November 20, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Customer Reviews:
Decent cheap camera. April 5, 2008
T. Hutt (London, UK)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a decent cheap camera. It supports UVC (USB video class) which is an open standard. This means you don't need to install creative's crap software, and it will work in Vista and Linux without installing any extra drivers.
The sensor is 640x480 at 30 fps (and some imaginary extra pixels for photos). This is very decent for the price and easily good enough for use as a webcam; the network will be the limiting factor for image quality.
The camera doesn't have a great depth of field but the manual focusing ring is easy enough to adjust so it's not much of a problem.
Video is smooth and the delay/latency is actually pretty good. Performance in low light is also pretty good for a camera this cheap, but predictably you still get lots of hue noise. Switching to black and white improves this, at the cost of no colour at all.
The base is ok but not great. It's not a hugely intelligent shape so you might need some blutack.
My biggest problem with this camera is the very high level chromatic aberration. If it is focused then loads of edges have purple and green halos. You can 'fix' it by defocussing the camera a bit but that's just stupid. The automatic colour balance also screws up quite a lot. It seems to want to make every scene the same colour (perhaps skin colour) so if you put a red sheet of paper in front of the camera it makes it appear orange. Might be possible to turn that off but I haven't really experimented.
It would be nice if someone made a good quality webcam with non-scrolling shutter and a fast lens. Until that day a decentish cheap webcam like this is ok.
Main Pros:
UVC - supported by generic drivers
640x480@30fps
Cheap
Main Cons:
Lots of chromatic aberration
Dodgy colour correction
 Not for Yahoo April 3, 2008
D. J. Sienkiewicz
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
THis is a nice quality camera, but it will not work on yahoo. It can't be recognised by Yahoo messenger.
It does work very well on MSN,or whatever they call it now.
 nice quality December 18, 2007
Ian A. Thomson (Oxfordshire, UK)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Read the review and still clicked ok for updates, yes its a 20 minute download. But everything worked perfectly. A very nice quality of product and sits nicely on top of my laptop screen.
Did buy a cheapo webcam, which was a cheap for a reason, the optia certainly seems worth the money. Turns itself on (slowly) but automatically when choosing video call on Skype a lovely glowing blue light confirms its switched itself on. Come the New Year will be buying another Optia to send to my Mum. Can thoroughly recommend this product.
Creative Live! Cam Optia September 17, 2007
M. W. Parry (UK)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
This webcam is excellent. It worked perfectly and quality is brilliant. However, it took ages setting up with all the bundled programs. Then I made the mistake of doing the online update which took another 20 minutes! I finally got it going after well over an hour.
It also works great with Skype. Smart Face Tracking is good. It follows your face over quite a wide angle. It looks very good & seems of a high quality. Only one problem, it doesn't clip very securely on top of my LCD monitor though!
|
|
|
www.pcprotech.co.uk | |
