Customer Reviews

Creative Live! Cam Socialize HD 1080 1080P,12MP Webcam

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Very disappointed with this Creative brand web camera. The voice quality is really bad and I have to talk very close to the camera for other people to understand me, otherwise I think the noise cancellation feature is canceling out my own voice.

I bought this item and exchanged for another one, but both of them couldn't see anything when I took the webcam toward outside. My old Creative webcam VF0050 can do it.

I don't know why. What should I do?

I believe the camera would be an amazing find if I could figure out a simple way to turn off the auto focus capability. This auto focus changes the image and makes things blurry on a regular basis. Overall, great camera and software, but the auto focus makes it frustrating to use.

This camera zooms in and out constantly even when I'm perfectly still, and a light source is behind the camera. Compared with my other webcam a Logitech. The Creative Web camera HD1080 is frustrating and useless.

While this camera technically works on a Mac (USB, plug and play), the drivers and software that come with it are Windows-only. so when I found the color terrible and the hi-tech, fancy microphone system results much worse than what I get from my MacBook's built-in tiny mic, I couldn't adjust a thing.

I've not a single complaint with this webcam. Admittedly, I bought mine for half of the cost listed on Amazon from another etailer. I love Amazon, but no more than any of the other proved reliable etailers. It's an easy search, do so, it may not sting so bad when you get a better deal.

So with that in mind, I'm simply not too upset when the camera takes a bit to find it's focus. Should one day it get to me, I'll simply take the thirty seconds I would otherwise wait for the cam, and use the manual over-rides in the accompanying software. So for those who dislike the AF feature on this cam, try another tact...

This is not meant to supersede the new, rather amazing point and shoot and film in HD cameras currently available for not much more. It's a webcam, meant to do webcam things better than previous generations of webcams did, and it does by leaps and bounds in this price range! To carry it around tethered to a laptop outdoors, as one poster alluded to. If the auto-white balance didn't handle the sun, as stated, use the manual overrides. Just because one auto-white option is outdoors, I honestly do not think that was what this webcam was meant to be used for. Its not waterproof, no weather shielding. Gee, I wonder if it works underwater?... Really, this product was designed to sit in front of you, so you can photograph, make small files, or HD if you desire, but from a reasonable distance of two to five feet, and under lighting conditions expected in a typical office/home environment... It does focus on the background pretty well, but clarity is lost the further from it your subject becomes. So it should work fine for the typical application.

I honestly hesitated, after reading the reviews, just before I purchased this webcam. I then decided that I know better than to read the majority of these or any reviews and take them for more than what they are. I look at the language used, the problems encountered and the detail used to describe them... The users, who inevitably state "why can't I do this?", you can see their unfounded expectations jump out at you when reading the content and context of their disappointments. I then look over the specs and even RTFM myself. I then weight cost/value ratio... Does it do what I want, suit my needs?

I love to read reviews though, and always start with the worst first. The ones where the product simply doesn't work. These are the reviews that help estimate the chances of an RMA. Medium ranked reviews come from a mixed bag. They are written by the guys who setup their mom's email (as they should), and they are confident of their limitless knowledge and comprehensions of all things technical. However, there is gold in these same mid category reviews. Reviews in which the person actually read the marketing, who did RTFM, and who did read and understand the specs. These are the ones to pay attention too... The ones that will say, "They are off a little here, but make up for it over there." They give advice on any abnormal situations they've come across. Situations that simply exist in any new, and even a lot of old technology. Bugs don't exist, until they affect you. These bugs are not always known, but often times are. If they are known, they sold this item with the expectation that too few people will be affected. If it's you, we are happy to offer you an RMA...

Seriously though, overall, I find that the "Creative Live! Cam Socialize HD 1080" performs as a quality, inexpensive webcam should. It pacts a good amount of camera features into a very small space (The actual cam/lense, not the mounting plastic). It has decent support software package, which is intuitive and easy to use. And most importantly, it worked right out of the box on my Win7-64bit PC, functioning as designed, not one problem in the month+ that I've owned it...

CG

I don't often write reviews, but every once in a while a product comes along that is so terrible and has caused so much grief that I am compelled to put together a review. If I help even one person avoid buying this thing, I will have done my part to make the world a better place.

First and foremost, while I was fairly certain the "1080p HD" stuff was likely a gimmick, I failed to realize how much of a gimmick it is. My guess based on my image quality testing is that this is actually a 640x360 webcam (that's 360p, or 1/3 of the advertised horizontal lines) with a pretty box and a "1080p" label. What a joke! (I have tried, fruitlessly, to confirm the actual sensor resolution from Creative support. The fact they dodged the question when writing back to me seems telling.)

Then there's the issues with just about every function of the camera:

-Auto-focus is unnecessary since the closest focus distance covers from your computer chair to across the room. But with no option to permanently disable it, you'll have to disable it each time you use the cam, or wait 30 sec every so often for it to figure out if you are 100 feet away, or if you are, in fact, in the same room as the camera. (uh, duh)

-Exposure also works terribly, using what seems to be an even averaging of the field of view to determine how much light sensitivity to use. There are no settings for exposure other than some post-capture filters. So if your background takes up a good amount of the image (the wide angle lens pretty much guarantees this), and it is not lit at the same level as your face, you can expect your face to have blown-out whites or detail-less shadows. Software image filters can't fix this kind of mis-exposure. The cam desperately needs manual exposure control because the terrible firmware is not capable of anything useful.

-White balance has a similar problem as exposure and auto-focus. It is based on an averaging of the field of view, so if your background isn't white, be prepared to be a weird color when set to auto. It can (thankfully) be manually configured, but it is difficult to get right because 1/5th of the slider are levels within reason, and the rest are cosmic reds.

In summary, don't waste your time, money, patience, or whatever else you enjoy having by buying this product. I'm sorry that I can't offer an alternative to this item. But I have been so soured by this purchase, that I am convinced that all webcams are just a ruthless marketing game played by companies to shamelessly lure unwitting, computer/technology illiterate consumers into actually believing they got a great HD camera. And the sad part is, many people do! (See: everyone who gave a positive review of this camera.) For now it is back to using the cheapo cam I got for $15 2 years ago. The quality of my old cam is really not that much worse when taken on the whole.

Note: These issues were all experienced with the latest drivers, firmware, and software for the cam as of 8/17. I even uninstalled and re-installed everything to humor the Creative support people. It's difficult to fix poorly designed hardware by updating software...

The Good:

1. Runs out-of-the-box in Linux, I'm using Ubuntu 10.10. Plug'n'play! Frame rates at 1080p were slow in Cheese, but fast in others, so it's a bug in Cheese or the Gstreamer properties.

2. Can go up to 1920x1080.

3. Has great sound, I didn't have a problem with sound unlike some other reviewers, it was very clear.

4. Auto-brightness, I didn't have a problem with this either. It would accurately adjust the image when brightness levels changed, though it may be a bit on the slow side in doing so. It didn't keep trying to adjust them and do so incorrectly like auto-focus does...

Struggles with:

Auto-focus. As others have commented, it takes quite a while for it to focus sometimes, and many times even when it is focused it will change focus for the worse, triggering responses like, "Noooo, why are you focusing in that direction, it was fine, go back go back!" It doesn't seem to be very smart with figuring out which direction it needs to change focus to clear up the image.

Because this camera is only semi-smart, I'm giving it 4 stars.

This camera makes recording anything longer than 30 secs a problem. It continuously focuses with no way to adjust or turn off the auto focus feature. The image is NOT HD quality and the sound quality is terrible. I cannot believe I spent this much money on a lemon.

Don't drop this webcam because the lens will crack. I accidentally dropped it and the lens just cracked. If this happens you guys should just take the glass off. But other than that it's pretty good. The focus is great but if you use it with Mac it would look weird.