For when the world needs to see with pristine detail your cat playing inside a paper bag in the middle of the kitchen, or every blemish on your face as you regale the exciting story of your day, Microsoft's unveiled the
LifeCam Cinema HD webcam. The USB 2.0 device captures life in 1,280 x 720 HD resolution at 30 frames per second, with auto focus, 4x digital zoom, a noise-canceling mic on top, and something called ClearFrame for smoother video, somehow. It's not without caveats, of course, requiring a dual core processor (1.6GHz minimum, 3GHz recommended) and listing for $80, but it does happily tout its Windows 7 compatibility out of the box. Interests piqued? The webcam'll be popping up in stores on September 9th, which as it turns out, is
becoming a rather busy day for tech enthusiasts.
Update: Looks like the 720p mode is capped at 15FPS. Tsk, tsk.
posted August 18th 2009 3:07AM
Hope it works ok with OS X
I completely agree. I've been hanging out for a nicely designed webcam ever since they stopped making the iSight. And this looks really good. Hopefully MS wont be small minded and will provide OS/X drivers.
Totally - having this webcam hooked up to my mac and set to auto-answer to do some video when I'm not there.
Am annoyed with the quality of the cam, some clean pictures in sun and shade @ 30fps and great resolution would definitely be cool!
Assuming it's standard USB video class, it should work fine in OS X as well. But it does have the mark of proprietary on it, err Microsoft, so who knows.
Really a shame Firewire never caught on more then it did. I'm betting a good chunk of that CPU overhead is due to USB alone. Thats one reason I still try to find Firewire hard drive enclosures. Copying files across a bus shouldn't tax my CPU.
This should be a nice replacement for my horrible Logitech Quickcam S5500 that permanently squishes me horizontally... for some reason. Who the hell knows how this thing has managed to ship for so long with such an obvious flaw.
The main market for this could actually be the office environment as opposed to home. They aren't targeting laptops as the majority of new laptops have cameras built into the top of the screen.
WOW and iSight for Windows!
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought all these 1.3 and 2 MP webcams built into laptops these days were capable of 720p video. Guess not.
x MP is for still images.
The real problem with those usb cameras is the bandwidth.
A (cheap) camera is not able to compress the video, hence this send it as raw via the usb port.
Then the computer will compress the raw and put in a usable way.
a 1 megapixel camera use :0.375mb per frame (RGB or YUV).
To send 0.375 (30fps) it uses 11.25MB x second.
USB 2.0 in theory is up to 60MB X second but in a real case (usb 2.0 bandwidth is unstable) is about 10MB - 30MB x second.
So, you can expect to loss frames.
Is it just me or does or does a noise canceling mike sound like a contradiction in terms
yes if you are a noise person
Pictures of the video quality...
Great. A new wave of internet camgirls in all of their 15 year old HD glory.
Is this going to be UVC (thus work with any OS without additional drivers)? I hate it when a mere webcam requires a windows only special driver.
@dannyboy414,
"@macslut why would they support h264 when they'll probably use some window's based encoder running through silverlight? I have no clue about the software end but, if I was MS, I'd use this to pull more ppl in using their internet video based plug in."
1) Whatever hardware based encoder. The point being why pump raw video and require the heavy lifting on software running on the PC, especially when this can't be done without recommending 3GHz dual cores? Those same people in naughty chat rooms can afford a more expensive camera if they currently have that kind of PC hardware. Although they may be using that hardware for running all kinds of java and flash based apps for their service. And if we're catering to them anyway, it's worth noting that if you're going to pump raw video, you might as well get a cheap standalone and pump via Firewire so you can have all the features of a real camera.
2) Why use H.264? Because they'd be severely limiting where recorded video from this can be played if they don't. And even with streaming, they'd be excluding themselves from streaming to many devices except for PCs with their software. Microsoft has long lost any hopes of dominating with a video container or codec. Certainly, this product ain't going to do it for them, so instead of moving the world into this product, how about moving this product where the rest of the world is? I don't care how nice the video is from this webcam, I don't want it if I can't stream or at least play video on iPhones, iPods, PSP, Macs, iTunes, Zune, Blackberry, Pre, TiVo, Xbox, or a variety of other media devices like I could with video in H.264.
This is what I always wanted those external Apple iSight cameras to become, but Apple decided to drop the whole product line and just include crummy low res ones in all their monitors / computers (except the Mac Mini & Mac Pro).
Yes, only at less half the price, and more than 4 times the resolution :)
I bought the camera the other day and did a video review if anyone is interested in seeing it. I also did a side by side with the Logitech 9000 pro hope you enjoy it
personally I think this is a great camera and a nice set to the right direction
http://www.guysfromqueens.com/?p=409
http://www.guysfromqueens.com/?p=419