Admit it: You justified buying a black-and-white Connectix QuickCam as a business expense -- to experiment with videoconferencing maybe, or to snap an occasional photo or movie for inclusion in a presentation -- but you ended up using it mostly for fun. We suspect that Connectix's long-awaited Color QuickCam will find similar uses. Even though it's more than twice as expensive as the $99 black-and-white version, it's by far the most affordable color digital camera around. And even though it's plagued by annoying visual artifacts, you can coax decent images from the camera, and it's undeniably fun.
From the outside, the Color QuickCam is virtually identical to its black-and-white cousin. The most tell-ing difference between them is a notched collar surrounding the Color QuickCam's lens, for adjusting focus. There's also a difference on the cable end: Because it requires more electric power than the Mac's serial port can supply, the Color QuickCam has connectors for both the ADB and the serial ports. (The ADB connector has a pass-through, so you can still hook up other ADB peripherals along with the camera.)
Inside the QuickCam is the gadgetry that uses the extra juice: a charge-coupled device (CCD) that captures images at up to millions of colors at a 640-x-480-pixel resolution and a chip that delivers Connectix's new proprietary video compression, VIDEC (Video Digitally Enhanced Compression). VIDEC enables the Color QuickCam to deliver movie frame rates comparable to the original QuickCam's, despite the need to process three times as much data (red, green, and blue color channels, instead of only a single black-and-white channel).
An X-ray view of the Color QuickCam also reveals the absence of one component included in the original camera: The built-in microphone was scrapped to make room for the VIDEC chip. You can employ any Mac-compatible microphone instead, but you may have a hard time figuring out how to do so -- we couldn't even find the word microphone in the Color QuickCam manual.
Like the black-and-white camera, the Color QuickCam comes bundled with two programs -- one for creating videos and another for capturing still images. With color comes a wider range of image-quality adjustments for both programs and a few nifty new features as well.
The original software let you adjust image brightness but not much else -- and that was just about all you needed. The color camera's controls govern brightness, white level, hue, saturation, black level, and sharpness. The three-level sharpness control is particularly important, since it allows you to trade image quality for video frame rate: The least sharp setting, which Connectix recommends for videoconferencing, gives you smooth video by sacrificing the number of pixels captured in each frame.
The Color QuickCam manual touches on each of these controls only briefly, but you won't have to worry about them most of the time, thanks to the camera's Auto Hue and Auto Brightness settings: When activated, these controls set the camera's color and brightness controls automatically. We were hard-pressed to improve on them in normal indoor room lighting.
New features of the still-image photo software include AutoCapture, which enables you to take shots at any interval you choose, and an automatic timer that snaps a picture after any delay you specify.
Focus on Focus
A welcome improvement to the Color QuickCam is adjustable focus. To users of the original QuickCam who've longed for variable focus, this will sound like a boon, but it's more necessity than luxury: The Color QuickCam's lens is far less forgiving than its predecessor in terms of focal depth. An object a foot from the camera and one six feet away would both remain in focus with the original QuickCam, but with the Color QuickCam, focusing on one of those would blur the other.
Given the need for frequent focus adjustments, we wished the Color QuickCam's focusing knob had been more responsive. Twisting the focus ring to widen the focus sometimes seemed to have no effect on-screen, and the ring turned so easily it offered little feedback. Conversely, when we were tightening the focus, the knob offered so much resistance that we needed two hands to twist the ring -- and twice snapped it off. It snapped right back on, but we were left with a distinct impression of cheesiness.
In terms of overall image quality, the Color QuickCam is at once better and worse than its predecessor: Along with adding color, Connectix has succeeded in improving on the black-and-white camera's image sharpness, all without dropping video frame rate. However, the images are unfortunately marred by persistent blooming -- the presence of flat-white artifacts, with some green or blue around their edges, that appear no matter what the lighting conditions are. This problem diminishes significantly when you're taking close-up shots of still objects, but it makes the Color QuickCam useless for serious video work.
The Bottom Line
Given its price, the Color QuickCam is a remarkably good color digital camera, and the automatic adjustments in its video-recording and still-photo software make it easy to use. Despite many improvements over the camera's black-and-white predecessor, though, the Color QuickCam's image quality is seriously marred by the blooming effect. The camera's professional uses should be limited to occasional still shots for presentations or "rough draft" video prototypes. Or you can use it just for fun.
Connectix Color QuickCam, $230 (estimated street). Company: Connectix, San Mateo, CA; 800-950-5880 or 415-571-5100; http://www.connectix.com/. Reader Service: Circle #411.
REVIEWS / digital cameras
Collar ID:
You can tell the Color QuickCam from its black-and-white cousin by its lens-adjustment ring, or collar.
