How to pick a decent webcam

Did you just get a smartphone with a front facing camera and realize the person on the other end needs a camera too? Perhaps you've recently discovered Chatroulette? At some point you've decided you need a webcam. But which webcam do you get? There's just so many out there. Where do you start? This excerpt from David A. Karp's Windows 7 Annoyances will give you some pointers for finding the right webcam for your needs.

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Historically, buying a webcam has been an exercise in compromise. Webcams don’t have the universal appeal of, say, printers, and as such, don’t enjoy an abundance of high-quality choices nor the comfort of well-established industry standards.For instance, most webcams are cheap and offer horrendous video quality. As a result, many are quickly discontinued, making it extremely difficult to find up-to-date drivers for older models. (A webcam designed for Windows XP isn’t likely to work in Windows Vista or 7, and don’t even get me started on the search for 64-bit drivers.)

If you’re lucky enough to find a webcam that works with Windows 7/Vista, it probably won’t do everything you need it to. Of course, the most hyped feature—resolution—is the least important: a 5-megapixel webcam isn’t necessarily any better than a 1.3-megapixel model. (How often will you be taking still photos with an eyeball-cam tethered to your laptop?) But the sexier features, like motorized face tracking (enabling video chat without having to sit perfectly still), autofocus, network streaming (for surveillance, baby monitoring, and web publishing), and high frame rate (for smooth, blur-free video) are often mutually exclusive, making compromise inevitable.

If you’d rather do without the compromise, you’ll have to narrow the field a bit. Highest priority is UVC (USB Video device Class) compliance: you can plug a UVC webcam into any Windows 7 machine, and it’ll work without any special drivers. A UVC webcam won’t pose any problem for x64 Windows, nor the next few successors to Windows 7 (not to mention XP, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.).

Warning: You may also run across IIDC (Instrumentation & Industrial Digital Camera), which is an earlier counterpart of UVC, but exclusively for Firewire (IEEE 1394) connections. For instance, the Apple iSight is a IIDC camera, and is automatically recognized in Windows 7 as a “1394 Desktop Video Camera.” Alas, Windows 7 has no universal driver for the microphone in IIDC cameras, so it’s probably best to avoid IIDC unless you already own one and use a separate audio source.Also important is the brand name. If you don’t want to buy yet another disposable webcam you’ll have to replace in six months, avoid the cheap, no-name webcams and stick with Logitech, Creative Labs, or even Microsoft (gasp) to ensure driver availability in the years to come.

Note: Another way to avoid the “driver trap” is to use an IP camera, one that connects directly to your network (either wirelessly or with a Cat-5 cable). No USB connection means no USB driver is needed. And since most IP cameras with special features like pan-tilt-zoom controls are web-based, all you need is a browser to control it. (For this reason, avoid IP cameras that require proprietary software.) Finally, read online reviews—not surprisingly, they’re plentiful at YouTube—to see how well a particular model actually renders an image. Look for a webcam that performs well in low light and handles motion without blurring. A widescreen aspect ratio (16×9) is a plus, as is a good mounting system (for attaching to laptop and desktop screens, resting on a desktop, or perching on a tripod) and a built-in microphone that reproduces voice clearly.