Monday, June 15, 2009

Web Camera with Lights?

The next latest and greatest from the minds of manufacturers seems to be the Self Illuminating Web Camera. Yes I said self illuminating.


Gone are the days of worrying about back lighting or having to pay for a more expensive webcam that will auto adjust for light.

New out is a USB webcam that has six built in LED lights, which will allow use of the webcam in low-light situations. Not only that there is dimmer switch that allows you to adjust the light intensity and the push of a button.

Now for some specs. The camera is 2MP and will auto focus. There is no base, the camera is attached to a pliable arm that can bend in any direction. Of course it's connection is USB 2.0. The camera will capture video at 640x480 up to 1600x1200, now the key there is the fps the higher the resolution the lower the fps rate. It has a built in microphone as well so you do not have to purchase anything extra. The device runs for not only Windows XP/Vista users, it will also run on Mac OS 10.4+. Oh and the final tidbit of info, the price. The webcam has a price point of around 89.95

Now for some other possibilities, after reading a post on Twitter by Kathy Schrock I got to thinking and what she had to say was pretty ingenious. Now let me first premise this as my own personal thoughts and are not meant to disrupt the natural order of things for purchasing options for any company or ed facility. Kathy made a good point that this could be used as a low cost alternative for a document camera. Right now most document cameras run in the $400-$500 range with some higher and some lower.

With the light on the webcam, the ability to manipulate the arm in any direction, and the auto-focusing capability it could really lend itself to people who want that functionality of a document camera but cannot afford the outlay cost.

image from coolest-gadgets.com

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