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Logitech USB QuickCam Messenger

Logitech USB QuickCam Messenger

List Price: $49.95
Your Price: $39.89
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Piece of JUNK
Review: The picture quality is soo bad! it's not clear at all. I can't see a thing. Bad quality for not a so good price. wouldn't recommend it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great low-cost webcam
Review: The QuickCam Messenger is one little webcam that is totally affordable and works great. The resolution is 640x480, although the native resolution captured by the chip seems lower as at the maximum image quality is not what you'd expect from a true VGA digital camera. But that's ok. I usually run the QuickCam at a lower resolution, to improve framerate over my DSL connection. What's cool about this model is it has a built-in microphone, so you don't need to fumble with an external mic if your PC doesn't already have one built-in. (Tip: wear headset to avoid audio feedback into the mic, which will confuse the heck out of your chat companion!)

The webcam captures decent colors. The key is to have good ambient lighting: place a light behind the camera, not behind yourself! Also don't use a strong light source; something soft works best. The camera provides auto-white balance as well as auto exposure. Focus, however, is not automatic, so you need to manually turn the focus ring to get the sharpest picture of yourself. You can also snap still images of yourself, if that's what you are into.

If you run Windows XP, you don't need to install any driver. Just plug in the QuickCam Messenger, and fire up the latest version of MSN Messenger (version 6), which was compiled to work great with Logitech webcams, thanks to some marketing agreement between Microsoft and Logitech. You can also use Yahoo Messenger, but the new MSN Messenger has better video chat than Yahoo's offering. For AOL's instant messenging program, you'll need to install a utility on the companion CD-ROM. I haven't tried it since I don't use AIM, so can't comment on its quality.

For other flavors of Windows -- Win 2000, ME or 98 -- install the companion software first before you plug in the QuickCam Messenger. The installer will tell you went to plug the webcam into the USB port.

In short, this webcam gives decent image quality (esp. considering the price, before or after rebate) and has the nice touch of a built-in mic. The downside is no auto focus and so-so image quality.

Note: There's no support for Macintosh. If you use a Mac, get a Windows XP PC, or you can probably use Virtual PC 6 to make it work.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Fine webcam for its price
Review: The video quality over the web is OK. The integrated mic works great. The only thing I'm kinda unhappy about is the quality of snap shots. The saturation of the picture is pretty bad --- I mean everybody looks like a vampire with more-pale-than-actual face color. But given it's just a webcam and the price, I'd take that as given. Overall, a fine WEBCAM.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: This camera SUCKS
Review: This camera is HORRIBLE. The image quality is horrible, it's grainy, pixellated, and always blurry no matter how you adjust the circle, it has next to no options, and the color on it always looks bad, again, no matter how you adjust the settings. Overall, I would not reccommend this camera to anyone, it is a COMPLETE waste of money!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: rip-off
Review: This guy ripped me off by selling me two cameras that had the serial numbers cut off. One of them didn't even work and now I am having trouble returning it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent camera
Review: This is a great webcam. It has smooth video and a clear microphone. It is definantly the best in it's price range. The included software is easy to use. Thank you to the previous reviewer who suggested to put a light behind it. I have done that and no one has ever had a problem seeing me. The $15 rebate was also a nice incentive, bringing it down to the price of the cheaper one in Walmart. Great buy, excellent value.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good camera, but.....
Review: This webcam has great picture quality during the day time, but during night it has problems with the picture quality -- it has a hard time normalizing the light in the room (from the lamps). Other than that little bugger, it is a solid cam with video recording capabilities. I bought it using a coupon from UnderTag.com, so it was almost free for me.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: It is the perfect shape for batting practice.
Review: To start with I am running an athlon xp 2400 with 512 megs of name brand ram on an epox aka8 motherboard with raid. My video card is the ati all in wonder radeon 7500 with the tv in and out great for video editing and recording shows on cable tv. I am using Windows 2000 professional for my os.

I tried installing this camera 10 times now. have yet to have it work at all. I then started nortan systemworks 2003 and it finds tons of registry errors on my system. Disk doctor finds other errors on the system. The system was error free, and spyware free before installing this cam. I tried downloading the software online for the latest verstion and that again does not work. Just send my yahoo messanger into debugging.

I have had good luck in the past with Logitech however this time arround it wasn't the same. Logitech should re emburse everyone the money they paid for this piece of plastic and cut a check for the time they wasted trying to make it work. I paid $30 for it and lost about $80 in my time so cost to me is arround $110. Plus I still have problems being fixed with nortan in an ongoing cleaning process.

Since the "fatcats" at logitech won't write out the checks I suggest pulling out your Louisville Slugger, toss it in the air and send it out of the park, then mow the peices of it up with a high powered mower, bag it and mail it into logitech. It would make great mulch I give it -5 stars. However one good thing it looks good on my compost pile all mangled up or at least picturing it that way as I return it to Walmart, and they have to deal with getting their money back. I can't destroy it but I can imagine it lol.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Good hardware, but unreliable software
Review: What I ran it on: My computer was a 600MHz AMD, 768MB RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon, running Win98SE, with an AT&T Broadband Internet connection.

The Install: The installation appeared to go without a hitch. If you don't follow the very specific instructions that the software provides then you will probably run into problems.

The Picture: The picture on the Quickcam Messenger was surprisingly good. The friend I was having a Video chat with through Yahoo Messenger had a webcam from a different vendor that cost about half as much and her picture quality was consistently poor.

The Framerate: While recording a video to my hard drive the framerate was more than adequate. Over the internet was another story, but I question whether any other webcam could have done better.

Reliability: This is where everything goes bad. In the 60 minutes I spent video-chatting with my friend I had to reboot my computer more than 6 times. Even when I wasn't broadcasting images over the Internet, and simply stared at myself on my desktop, the camera (or software) consistently locked up. The software provided is loaded with bugs and merrily installs itself everywhere on your computer (quick-start toolbar, desktop, program menu). I finally gave up on the camera after 2 days of trying to get it to work reliably (updating drivers and such) and returned it. My guess is the camera works great, but the software was thrown together as an after thought. After un-installing the software my computer has never been the same. I can no longer play Windows Media files and I can no longer run graphic intensive applications. I ended up having to re-format my hard-drive, I used this as an opportunity to install Windows XP... 98 is outdated now anyways.

Annoyances: If you bought a monitor, and the monitor manufacturer said "You need to subscribe to a 3rd party service in order to view the Internet through your new monitor." I bet you'd be pretty annoyed. Well that is essentially what Logitech did when they teamed up with SpotLife. You can use the webcam to broadcast video over messenger services such as MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo, etc... But, if you want to broadcast live video from your computer to a web host (as a browser accessible nanny-cam or something) then you'll need to do so through SpotLife. SpotLife gives you a free trial period of course, but the freedom of doing what you want with the streaming images generated on YOUR computer has been taken away from you.

Summary: I waited a week after returning my Quickcam Messenger before I wrote this review. I knew that I should let my emotions cool down a little so I could try to write something informative and objective. The webcam may have performed reliably on a system with a different OS and some people might like the idea of SpotLife (it's actually a good idea for people that can't write HTML). If you can buy it from someplace with a flexible return policy then give it a whirl... just have your OS CD handy... for the install... and for when you need to re-format your hard-drive after the un-install.

The Bottom Line: I will be buying another webcam, but I'm going to avoid products by Logitech. That's too bad because I used to really like Logitech.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: OK IM camera - Not so good for anything else
Review: Your satisfaction with this repackaged QuickCam Express (now with microphone!) will depend completely on what you want to do with it. If you are looking for a webcam to use with an IM client it should be fine - the image isn't great, but the compression used on video IM is aggressive enough you'll never notice the difference.

If, on the other hand, you want to use it as a web cam, keep looking. The image quality is terrible - beyond terrible - with tons of jpeg artifacts and poor color balance. It's also not clear to me that the marketing guy who wrote 640x480 resolution on the box ever spoke to the person in engineering who actually built a camera capable of only 352x288 images. That disconnect is indicative of the overall attention to detail on this webcam - good enough for IM, but absolutely nothing else.


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