Customer Reviews

Creative Labs WebCam Instant

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

It's interesting that most folks base the performance of the web cam based on the device alone and discount other important factors like the lighting, bandwidth (connection speed) and the particular chat program in use. I also think that most folks expect too much with the current web cam technology which, in my opinion, have not seen a bleeding edge development and progress over the years.

Creative Webcam Instant does its job well and comes at a reasonable price. With Yahoo, I experienced 2-second delay. With MSN, it was about 1 second. Still good enough for home use. With T1 connection at work, it was almost real-time. Smooth movement and great quality. No jerky movements. Overhead lighting at my office helped, too. Again, for other buyers, this webcam may not have performed so well due to their PC performance, DSL/cable speed, etc. For you, Yahoo may work better than MSN. I have not tried this with other IM apps. I also noticed that this web cam sits (or grabs) better with the laptop and LCD monitor than CRT monitor, but again, some people are more or less tolerant about minor details.

If you have the extra cash, want the built-in microphone, extra imaging software and always want the very best, both Logitech and Creative offer good products. For video monitoring in real time, Labtec seems to offer some solid products. But in the end, you have to ask how well it will perform over the Internet or LAN with your existing PC/network setup. $30 web cam may do just as well as $100 web cam.

If your goal is to see someone you care while chatting, this is a good buy for your money.

i have a notebook webcam from creative. i love it because it's so small that it fits on top of the screen and the resolution is very good. but this new product is better in terms of resolution. awesome quality with respect to a webcam. it has got the advantage that it can be used both with desktop and laptop (mine only fits with a laptop). if you have both types of computer, buy this one. creative deserves credit. i paid amazon $25.54 (which included S&H).

This camera works perfectly for windows xp as well as Windows XP x64 and has some nice software included. Also the image quality is great and setup is very simple.

Extremely sturdy. Very well designed. You can turn it and twist it in any desired angle. The quality is great. Does not have the fancy features of the more expensive varieties but I do not need them. The software that comes with this is also fairly good. Highly recommend this especially if you simply want to use a webcam for online chatting.

I second the first reviewer's opinion. This is a total piece of sh*t. First I had trouble getting it to work on my WinXP desktop. After a couple reboots it finally worked, and the image quality was a total joke, even in the webcam capacity. The video quality was visibly worse than my 5-year-old Logitech webcam which had cost me about the same amount at CompUSA five years ago. In the end I returned this POS and will keep using my Logitech until it dies.

I can't believe how generous other reviewers have been in assessing this cam's awful performance. The images are sooooooooo blurry and dull - maybe it works better in very bright light but for normal lighting conditions forget it. I have a 5 year old Intel web cam that works a milion times better than this piece of junk. Some friends of mine in the Philippines just bought a cam from A4Tech for about $15 equivalent and that produces a very nice picture so there is no way one can put this cam's abysmal performance down to low price. Please don't waste your time or money with this terrible cam. I would really have liked to have awarded it no stars whatsoever.

worked well but then the one of the clasp broke. so cannot hold on to the screen and hence now useless to me

the clasp joint is very fragile

not a good purchase !!

This is a cheap, no frills webcam. I bought it specifically because it WAS so cheap and because I wanted a simple webcam to put on my desk at work to act as a spy to see who was going around stealing things off people's desks after hours and I wanted it to be cheap in case what they stole next was my camera.

I think its mere presense did the job of deterrent. It did catch some people eyeballing it suspiciously before wandering off, but neither it nor anything from my desk ever disappeared again.

That said, here's my breakdown:

Included software: Very good. Comes with software "motion detection" which is what I use to record movement around my desk, but also has time lapse and photo modes in addition to actually just being a webcam. There's also some way of setting up the camera to monitor it remotely but the firewall at the office was blocking that function so I haven't tried it.

Camera quality: "Sufficient". Not great. The camera seems to have minor "fits" that will throw glitches on screen once in a great while. This isn't really noticable until you use motion detection. The motion detection function would frequently capture an image of a blank wall doing nothing very exciting and it took me a while to realize that what sets off the motion detection is sometimes just "noise" which I presume to be a result of a poor quality camera. Like it gets a moment of static which trips the motion detection software and it ends up recording a short stint of absolutely nothing happening. (Edit: I was able to greatly reduce the incidence of this by turning off the automatic light settings. Turns out, at some point the software decides that the lighting is too light or too dark and makes an adjustment, which cause enough of a picture change to trigger the motion detector... setting it to manual removed about 75% of the "noise" hits I was getting.)

It would also be nice if the motion capture had a small 1 or 2 second buffer so that it will always record the event that tripped it. As it is, sometimes it will also trigger from something going by fast enough that the software gets tripped but doesn't start recording fast enough to catch what tripped it.

The camera's max resolution is pretty low, as well, though I guess that's about on par for web cams. On the bright side, you can record quite a lot of time without taking up a lot of drive space but on the other hand, it's going to be low quality stuff.

Still, not bad for the price. I'm happy enough with it. The plastic stand is nice, too, giving you a decent chance of finding a place to set it or hook it (the bottom "leg" you see in the picture can swing out to act as a claw if need be, e.g., to place on top of a monitor or cubical wall...)

I might even be tempted to call it "5 stars, relative to other cameras you could get for this cheap" but I'll leave it at 4 stars, mainly for those glitches that interfere with motion capture.

You can certainly find a better web cam out there, but if you're looking for something cheap and sufficient, this one will probably do the job.

I recently bought this product and I had a hard time installing the software. I could open the webcam center once and then after that it wouldn't open anymore. However, the picture quality is pretty good and only minor delay.

I'm sure there are better cameras out there but for $25, this is a bargain. It works well, although it's not too hot in dim lighting. Overall I am very impressed with the low price, image quality, and ease of setup.