See you? See me! (Mustek WCam 300)

Member Name: grahamt

Product:	Mustek WCam 300
Date:	12/10/03 (742 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Compact, Good value, Good quality

Disadvantages: Can't use sideways

My son lives in Manchester and we only get to see him once in a while. Although it's "Good to Talk", the phone is still an expensive method of communication and , unless you have a videophone, you can't see your correspondent. A Webcam and something like MSN Messanger could solve both problems.

I am a laptop user. I have looked at webcams in the past but all have seemed to be designed solely for desktop users. What I wanted was something compact that would clip onto the screen and be small enough to carry around.

I was not looking for a dual purpose webcam, one that could also be used as a stand-alone camera. There are too many compromises with these, too big to be of use as a webcam, not good enough quality to be used as a digital camera.

I found this one in PC World. There it is sold under their own brand name, PCline. It is exactly the same model though.

The CCD is a colour one with a pixel density of just 350K, much less than virtually every digital camera but about the same as in most VHS or Video8 video cameras. At this density it supports a maximum picture size of 640 x 480 pixels. At this size the video refresh rate is just 15 frames per second and so movement can seem a little jerky. Take the picture size down to 320 x 240 or lower and that rate goes up to 25fps although the spec says 30fps. The focus can be adjusted with the ring surrounding the lens. There seems to be good depth of focus.

The body of the camera also contains a microphone. I find that often the mikes built into laptops suffer from mechanical noise pick-up and so one which is distant from the electronics can produce better results.

The webcam connects to the laptop via a USB connector. This supports USB 1.1, not the newer USB 2.0 data rate. This is, however, adequate for this purpose. The webcam is, of course, powered through the USB port. It takes a drain of 500mA at 5Volts so it's probably not a
good idea to run it on laptop battery power.

The base of the webcam is rubber. It forms a U shaped clip that sits across the frame of the laptop screen so that it sits about an inch above the screen. It can also be used with a desktop and for this they supply some velcro strips which you need to stick onto the base of the webcam and some convenient place on the desktop, say on top of the monitor. The cable is about 1 metre long.

It can be angled backwards and forwards to adjust for height but cannot be swivelled so it needs to sit right in front of you. Also, although the capture software allows you to make loads of adjustments, to picture characteristics such as brightness, contrast, gamma and so on, as well as flipping the picture to mirror or upside-down, it cannot be rotated 90 degrees so you would not be able to clip it to the side of the screen.

The packaging states that the minimum O/S level supported is Windows98 SE. I currently only use Windows98 as some of my old machines will simply not support anything higher. I bought the webcam on chance and in practice found absolutely no problems installing it.

There is an installation CD which contains the webcam drivers plus some free software in the shape of Ulead Photo Express 4.0 My Custom Edition and also VideoLive Mail 4.0. I have used Photo Express in the past but, these days I mostly use Irfan Skiljan's excellent freeware package, IrfanView.

Whichever image manipulation software you use, it will interface with the picture capture program that comes with the camera using the standard TWAIN interface used universally by webcams and scanners. The capture software snaps the picture and the Transfer button then passes the picture to your editing program.

The picture quality is perfectly acceptable and more than adequate for the purpose. I have even taken a new portrait photo with it and will upload it to my website so you can see for yourself.
I am very pleased with this purchase and feel it is well worth the price. Be seeing you on the Internet?

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