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In lugnet.general, Erik Olson writes:
> In lugnet.general, John Henry Kruer writes:
> > Excuse my ignorance.. but what is a web cam? And what makes them so cheap?
> > Do they just have worse quality?
>
> Webcams are the tethered cameras (serial port, USB, whatever) made famous by
> Connectix (and others) as little balls that sit on top of your monitor and
> transmit your face.
>
> Earthlink gave them away with a subscription for a long while.
>
> Generally you get 320x240 resolution, in color nowadays, but the picture is
> ... fuzzy ... Better ones feature 640x480 resolution, still fuzzy. Much like
> a paused frame on your VCR. They may include a manual focus (twist the lens
> to unscrew) or have single fixed focus. You can't go much closer than 12
> inches with these things.
>
> I did all my webpages with one of these in 1998. Yuck. Luckily I was able
> to borrow a real camera to preserve pictures of my Lego. I didn't get a real
> camera until about a year and a half ago.
In 2002, webcams are a whole different breed. My favorite is the Intel PC
Pocket camera which is running at
http://www.appleogue.net/kindalive.html
Focus can be brought very close using the manual focus. Bonus: It can be
unplugged and used away from the PC. (Manual focus is disabled in this mode,
unfortunately)
These pics were done that way (this page takes a while to load, sorry)
http://www.irishpipersclub.org/saturday2002.html
or
http://www.irishpipersclub.org/Images2
Now, I'm not saying that this is a good camera. 640X480 max, only decent
memory, no zoom, no LCD preview, no macro but it only costs about US$70
(after rebate). Snapshot mode requires a steady hand. I took lots of blurry
pictures because I wasn't steady enough.
I think that Logitech has produced a similar, but slightly more expensive
camera that is similar.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Digital camera
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| (...) Webcams are the tethered cameras (serial port, USB, whatever) made famous by Connectix (and others) as little balls that sit on top of your monitor and transmit your face. Earthlink gave them away with a subscription for a long while. (...) (22 years ago, 20-Mar-02, to lugnet.general, lugnet.publish.photography)
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