Gadgetory

hi guys this is Mike Benton with pocketnow.com and this is the video portion of the review for the logitech quickcam pro for notebooks you may be wondering why it's so dark in this room and the answer is because there's no lights on in this room the only light is coming from the screen of the notebook that this quick cam is attached to I'm actually filming this with the quick cam itself what's amazing about this is the right light technology that Logitech has incorporated into this you can tell that maybe the frames per second artists great because there's a little bit of blurring motion here but that's just because it's adjusting for the very low light level that's in this room I'll show you what it how well it performs when we turn on the light now I'm in Arizona so I'm just going to open up this bright window that we have over in there it gets more light going on in this room now we have an imbalance of light we have contrast on this between the two sides and it still manages to get a good picture one of the key things that doing a vidcast is that you have equal lighting so you don't have too many shadows on your face so this is pretty equal it's really just one light bulb over here and a window over here except it looks like I'm actually in a studio let me step it up a notch and show you what it looks like when we have light behind us if you're on the move you have very many options about where you're gonna do your little webcam session so you've seen how many different ways we can actually look with the different lights that we have going on here now one of the bonuses of the software features that come with the logitech quickcam pro 4 notebooks is the ability to have face accessories you might be wondering well what is that well this is one of my favorite ones it's I'm a pirate now so just turn that on it tracks your face so it's able to put an SS free on there and there's all kind things that you can do can be a cowboy it can be tired you could be John Lennon you can go take a siesta somewhere go rob a bank if you want except be kind of hard through the internet if you want to be a Chinese dragon there's a whole number of things that you can do with this it's really interesting it can be completely goof you fill in to another one this one's a little bit CPU intensive Logitech suggests for XP users that you have 2.4 gigahertz with 512 megabytes of RAM I suggest that this laptop right now is 2.4 gigahertz XP with 512 megabytes of RAM so we have the option of these avatars which are just completely as you can see they just completely take up the video frame so if you want you could stay anonymous and what it does is it'll actually track your eyebrows and your mouth and which way your heads going so you maybe you can turn around and look around if you want you can go back to Jurassic Park this one is one of the more CPU intensive ones so as you can tell the men off doesn't really move and cordons for Vista users Logitech suggests 2.8 gigahertz with a 1 gigabyte of RAM and I completely agree with them these avatars rely on your CPU to do their performance so the better the CPU the better the avatar it's got a little wiggle in my eye there so what you can do is you can actually calibrate it so it will actually get your face right and we'll do a little calibration here okay there we go that looks a little bit better so another thing that's available is the fun filters what you could do is you can actually if you want to do the whole mystery thing Who am I you can't really recognize me but you can see that I'm a guy you can do the mosaics with the tiles which you know it's another low nonnamous thing of 50s music movie real you can do the whole ghosting effect so if you want to move around real quick and what can never really get a clearer picture of you that's fine do the negative it can do the hall of mirrors you could do the eighties music videos what they call it the whole sketched look so you can pretend that you're Bon Jovi get a large mystic or hey I'm at your front door you want to open it up okay or the neon look there's other filters available as well as avatars and the face assessments in fact there's at least had 10 to 20 pages of accessories online that you can look at and just totally customize it downside is you can only use one accessory at a time so if I wanted to combine this this look with the pirate look I can't it's too unfortunate even though most of us would like to be a little beaver pirate be great so anyways that's almost everything another part about this is I mentioned it's a two megapixel webcam it has the ability to upscale to 8 megapixels comes with an embedded microphone which I'm using right now with writes on technology cancels background noise and echo it also has the ability to face track so it can follow you or two or more people that can also do the face accessories base filters and the avatars and one of the best parts is because it's a 2-megapixel it's able to actually record an HD video now I've tried recording an HD video on this machine and the performance is really lacking so it wasn't able to record and do face accessories or an avatar at the same time it's able to but the performance was lacking so if you want to use all of those mixed together then you might want to invest in a higher-end machine otherwise this webcam is perfectly it's good to go on the very top of the webcam there is a button that you can push it'll take a picture called quick capture and it'll you can set the folder that it'll go to in Vista there's a gadget available for your your gadget sidebar for the webcam so you can just go over there click a button and it'll pop up the interface and you'll be able to do whatever you want there including send it off to somebody upload it to YouTube most of all the features are available from the quick cam interface when you pop it up plug it in that pops up it's available on the system task bar if you haven't actually 100 bucks laying around go ahead and get it directly from Logitech or one of the big store chains and this if you don't have a webcam I'd highly suggest you look into this one or any of the newer quick cam pro editions and again I'm like Benton aka the pocketnow.com pirate and I hope you enjoyed this vid cast