For Christmas, I ended up getting some spare money for myself and bought me a present of my own. I bought a new Logitech Orbit AF webcam.
This Camera is expensive, but worth the money. At just around one hundred thirty dollars, it’s not good on a those budget, but it does some really nifty features. First of all, for a webcam, it has EXCELLENT picture quality. It uses Carl Zeiss optics to deliver simply amazing video and pictures. It can even do video up to 1600 x 1200 pixels, which is HD Quality. It even has the ability to take pictures with it’s 8 MegaPixes, with a software enchancment. It even has the ability to track your movements and pan and tilt with it. It also has a decent Zoom, and an auto focus feature, that I have had to try to work around once, as the focus got off for some strange reason. I believe I had messed with the manual focus and got it all messed up, so until I know the reason it happened, I just have to assume that I caused the error.
Now, The camera does come with a pole to raise the camera orb. To use, you pull the orb off the stand, place the orb on one ond of the pole and the other end back in the base, and now you have about a six inch raised camera. This is really useful if you need to rise the level of the camera, as well as it helps if you need to lower it back down. To lower, just unhook the orb and the pole and plug the orb back into the stand.
I really like the camera, and I have used it a couple of times. I even used it to stream a little of me playing the MMO City of Heroes, and turn it to my monitor when I playing some Xbox 360. The Overall picture was decent, but not that great when viewing the monitor then, as I didn’t mess with my brightness, contrast, or gamma levels on the monitor. If you plan on streaming stuff on a TV or computer monitor, I do sujest that you change your change your levels so that it shows up good on the video.
All in all, this is the webcam that I wanted when I got my first webcam. The quality is amazing, it has features that I love. The only bad thing if the cost. If you are planning on getting one, you might want to consider this camera if you are doing a stream with ustream or one of the other live streaming video sites. If you end up going out and getting a webcam for thirty dollars and some change, do not be surprised if the quality isn’t all that grand. If you can afford the Logitech Orbit, then you might want to consider getting it. I give this camera a rating of 9 out of 10.