Voip Blog
Creative Labs goes wide
Friday, September 08, 2006
Creative Labs has a very enthusiastic webcam offering called the Live!Ultra. As if the exclamation point wasn't exciting enough on its own. Personally, I would have gone for Extreme!Wide!Angle!VoipCam!!! Because a 76° viewing angle is surely worth 6 exclamation points.
Consumer feedback is overwhelmingly positive about this potential addition to your voip internet phone chat sessions, but a few people complained that the mount was sometimes fiddly and unstable. If that's the only thing wrong with this webcam, I'm sure I can MacGyver up a workaround with some modeling clay and, possibly baling wire.
Pros:
- 640 x 480 (VGA) resolution at 30 frames per second
- Ginormous 76° viewing angle
- Backwards compatible USB 2.0
- 1.3 megapixel (interpolated) for still pictures
- Smart Face tracking that can track more than one person at a time
- CCD sensor
- Adjustable manual focus
- 4X digital zoom
Cons:
- Base sometimes not stable
- Resource hungry software can bog your system down
- Expensive
- Windows only
- Some limitations in software color and lighting correction
Instead of shelling out the full retail price of $79.99, you can always get one on eBay--the average price was $47 with a shipping charge that hovered around the $15 mark. This is a definitely a serious contender for our VoipCam solution.
