Best of both worlds (Intel PC Camera Pro Pack)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Intel PC Camera Pro Pack
Date:	21/02/02 (2001 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent price, Dual webcam/video capture feature, Easy to use, quality pictures

Disadvantages: Needs a decent graphics card for video capture

I had been looking for a video capture card for some time, and this caught my eye in the post Christmas sales in PC World. At £45, it wasn't much more expensive than most webcams, and was one of the cheaper video capture options on the market.

In the box you get the webcam itself, which connects vis USB, a video lead, a video connection cable (the one with yellow ends), an audio connector (red and white ends, connecting to a 3.5mm jack), as well ad the software and driver CD.

Installation is a quick and simple process, running the CD to install the drivers and software, then rebooting the PC, inserting the Webcam into the USB port and it will install the drivers itself. It takes less than five minutes, and there's a helpful document to take you through it all. However, to save space and money, the rest of the documentation is on the CD, which I always find unhelpful, as it makes it difficult to follow, as you either have to flick between the software window and the manual window, or print it out yourself.

Anyway, I'll break the review up into a section on it's capabilities as a webcam, and as a video capture device.

WEBCAM
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As a webcam, it's probably the best I've used. There is software provided which you can use to upload pictures to your webspace, which can optionally be marked with the date and time. However, I find this software awkward as it doesn't allow you to alter the name of the file you upload, nor upload a thumbnail for preview, so I use WebCam32 instead.

Image quality is superb, very sharp. You can capture at 160x120, 320x240 and 640 x 480, 320x240 being my choice. This will produce a file of about 15k, which is more than acceptable. The camera itself does not have autofocus, but there is a dial on the top which allows to you focus it manually. As well, there is a shutter which you can slide across to cover the lens when you are not using the camera.
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If you use the video capture software, which I'll mention in more detail in the video capture section, you can use the camera to record video, and if you hook up your microphone to the soundcard, you may add sound to these videos. The output format is AVI, which can be converted to other formats such as MPEG using software available from the internet.

The webcam itself is extremelt well designed, it has a USB cable of 3m to allow you to place it pretty far from your computer, and a base which has a peelable stickly layer to allow you to secire it to the space you wish to use it. As a webcam, I'd rate it as worth the money on it's own.

VIDEO CAPTURE
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This was where I started to encounter some problems, though these where not a fault of the webcam itself. I have no real video card on my computer, just onboard on my motherboard, and it can't really cope with all the processing that needs to be done to process the incoming image from the camera. My computer is a Celeron 667 with 192MB of RAM.

Connecting it to your source is easy, just connect the supplied video lead to your source (in my case, my VCR), and the audio lead into the line in socket of your soundcard.

From there, its a case of opening the capture software, selecting that the import is from the video in of the webcam, and your source will be displayed in the review window. It played smoothly at 160x120, but moving up to 320x240 it started to get quite jerky, and it was unusable at 640x480. However, I took the webcam over to a friends house, who had a GeForce 32MB card, and the quality at 320x240 was excellent, so my next purchase for the computer will be a decent graphics card.

The software itself is excellent, its simply a case of getting everything reay, setting the sound level, then clicking a button to start recording. It works out how long you can record by how much hard disk space you have available. Since
it is software encoding, the output format is AVI, but that can be converted to MPEG very easily by using one of the freeware applications found on the net.

If you use the webcam software supplied, you can also do image capture from your video source, simply by knocking the selector over to video in. Then you only need to click the button on screen, or the button on the actual webcam to take a grab. Each gran will open in a sperate window, and you can save them or delete them one by one once you have finished viewing your source.

The software also allows you to splice various sections of video together, as well as add background music of commentary using the line in or microphone sockets of your soundcard, which can be useful if you are transfering camcorder videos to your PC for conversion to VCD or even DVD if you're rick enough!

If the webcam could enocde real time in MPEG, I'd probably proclaim this camera the best thing since sliced bread, but even as it stands, I can't pick fault with it. It's a shame you need a graphics card to get the best out of it, but considering it requires a lot of graphical processing, that was to be expected really. If you're looking for either a video capture device, or webcam, I'd recommend this highly. Especially for video capture, as its USB and doesn't require you to open your computer, or use up a PCI slot.

Summary: