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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.