Customer Reviews

Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP Webcam ( 961422-0403 )

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The video is excellent, like all the previous good Logitech cams like the QuickCam Pro 4000. In fact, the video is better than the previous generation. The built-in mic has excellent sensitivity and clarity, which is a real plus. You can stand back from it, face away from it, and it still picks you up well, while rejecting a lot of room noise.

So, why did I only give it 2 stars?

1. It's a CPU hog. Even with the echo cancellation turned OFF, this camera consumes a good 10% more CPU on my same test system, when videoconferencing, when compared to a QuickCam Pro 4000 or Notebooks Pro model (the OLD Notebooks Pro model... the NEW one has all the same problems that this one does). That may not sound like a big deal, but it is when you start using 65% instead of 55% on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz machine (WinXP Pro SP1)

2. The acoustic echo cancelling (AEC) is shoddy and is a MASSIVE CPU hog.

When it's on, the CPU in the above test case jumps to 85%. And it doesn't really echo cancel very well. It does a lot of heavy gating off and on, causing sentences at each end of a conversation to frequently get cut off. And even so, it lets a lot of echo ring around and go back out.

3. The installer shoves an obnoxious set of auto-startup tasks and services into your system. If you aren't afraid to turn off Windows services and delete things from the "Run" folder of your registry, you can get rid of these things. But it's either that or install the "driver only" option in the installer. These things make the camera consume even MORE CPU, even with AEC off, than the numbers I quoted above (i.e. 75% instead of 55% for a simple 2-way video conference.

4. Beware of installing this if you already have other Logitech

cameras installed on your system. The new driver installer "says" that it uninstalls these, but you'll find that the old camera either won't work anymore, or neither one will, until you uninstall both and reinstall the new one. It's best to just uninstall the old one and install the new one. The old camera will then work with the new driver. AND IT WILL USE 10% MORE CPU THAN IT USED TO!

5. The pan/tilt function of the camera works, but it ONLY works with Logitech's little proprietary popup control panel, which you must enable off their tray icon. So, you have to leave some of those annoying "automatic" things running to get this to work. Further, it doesn't obey the standard DirectShow interfaces to make it move, so application writers can't very easily control the camera motion, if at all. I downloaded Logitech's SDK to do this. None of the SDK examples even run, and there is no tech support for it.

Background:

I installed the full product and let it do what it wanted (I didn't try to disable anything). I trained the AEC with their tool. It still doesn't really work.

I have DirectX 9.0c (latest), and Logitech's latest driver. In fact, when I downloaded the newer driver from their website, nothing got better and the CPU usage climbed by ANOTHER 5%!

I am a video programmer by trade, and have tested a large number of USB cameras and echo cancellation devices. I only tell you this to give you some level of faith that I'm not a total idiot, and I am used to evaluating these products.

If you are just an average user who plugs in the camera and uses it, this camera will work well. But forget the echo cancelling; that really doesn't work. All in all, you probably would have been better off with older models, because they installed easier, used less CPU, and caused less installation interaction problems with other cameras.

In other words, it's just a big step backward. If future releases of the driver improve things, great. But I give Logitech a big black eye for even putting out an initial release that ties down my machine this much.

All these problems are true of the Fusion and the new-generation Quickcam for Notebooks Pro. They all share a similar, if not identical, driver. So they all have the same problems.

I echo what one of the other reviewers stated.

The hardware is excellent: the image is NEVER grainy, even in miserable lighting conditions (monitor reflected light only, for example). Cowbofrank dot net gives some good examples of just how good the picture is in various lighting conditions. I have a wide array of cams (call me a cam fetishist) and until now I have benchmarked all cameras against my trusty old INTEL PRO which is 5 yrs old but still makes people as what I am camming with.

This one is visibly better uin quality and the CCD sensor, for once, makes a real improvement over the CMOS sensors in the cheaper cams.

The pan and tilt is 'cute' and gadgety (has a bit of a wow factor) but frankly, given the wide screen lens, it is not relly needed. Would have been better to work on an autofocus.

The RightLight and RightSound technology to improve sound and pic quality in a wide range of conditions are SUPERB. Nothing to compare it with other than expensive bi-aural mics and light measurement in a more expensive digital cam.

The fps is excellent. I really get comments that my cam seems like watching TV. And that is not just caused by the bandwith of my internet connection.

The reason I also ducked a star is because the software, especially the drivers, do hog resources. And not a little. I run a P4 machine, 3+ ghz, 2gb internal, and I noticed a difference. It truly does seem to load a lot of junk in the registry. I do not think it is a real problem, given the speed of today's machines and I think Logitech will fix this in future driver updates. They are loyal to their customers...

Also, keep in mind that this is a small trade off when you're on a quest for true video conferencing capabilities that don't give you the impression you are working with premature technology. This baby can run full screen video and do it without decline in fps.

I bought 3 of these for us, and my children who are all over the country. I was worried that the quality would be grainy and jumpy but to my surprise, it is really impressive. My daughter said it reminds her of the "eye" in Lord of the Rings!Easy to install, easy to use and works seamlessy with MSN Messenger. A great buy!

This pricey webcam lives up to the hype. This camera was purchased to replace an older Logitech model several generations old. All of the features work as promised. The face tracking is a little slow, but works and slow is good as you want the camera to think before bouncing all around making the viewer on the other end ill.

I use this camera on a Dell XPS 400 and Windows XP SP2. I loaded the software from the QuickCam 9.5 CD. I see none of the CPU usage or other issues others have discussed in other reviews.

I primarly use Skype for conferencing, but also have used AIM and MSN with this camera with no issues at all, by I highly recommend Skype for it's features. :-)

The video quality is the best I've seen for a consumer webcam and the echo canceling near perfect. I can't recommend this webcam highly enough, it is truly a great product.

The drivers and software came with it creates problems to other programs. If I were you, I will not purchase this product until all the driver conflicts are resolved. Things I am having problems with:

1. Drivers. Apparently, the drivers causes LINK.EXE and MIDL.EXE to freeze indefinitely (locking problems?). If you aren't a software developer, I believe it probably won't affect you. If you were using Visual Studio or Visual C++, these drivers will freeze linker or idl compiler. Uninstall the drivers fixes this problem.

2. Shutdown problem. After installing these drivers/softwares, shutdown seems to take much longer than usual if not frozen.

Too bad it is too late for me to return this product.

orbit mp cam itself is very good. Installing the software is another story. Quickcam software from cd never installed properly, only partial install so the video effects didnt work. I had to go the website and wait for a newer version of the software to fix the problem. The video effects is the only reason I bought the camera. Since then, two more updates to the software have been released, each one with their own set of problems from not installing properly to 100% cpu usage during web effects.

I have never had so many problems with webcam software. I am afraid to upgrade software due to the fact that it might break something. Good thing I have a Creative Labs Live Motion cam too.

I will never buy another Logitec cam. The Creative Labs cam software installed correctly the first time and updates are very simple and dont break anything. For my money Creative Labs cams is the way to go. Don't waste your time or money on a Logitech Cam. Their support is very bad too.

I upgraded from the Orbit to the Orbit MP and found that it is a major step backwards in quality.

The software control panel is much harder to use, with very coarse and twitchy sliders. You can't type numbers into the edit boxes.

Also, although still images are wonderful, the quality of live video for webcams and chat clients is horrendous. The subsampling algorithms used to convert the high-res camera images into low-res images for transmission cause blurring, loss of definition, and constant snow/shift patterns.

I'm going back to my $30 low res camera that provides higher quality for video conferencing.

I want to start by saying my computer is running a Pentium 4 w/Hyper Thread Technology, CPU 3.0 GHz with 800 MHz/FSB..not a "killer" system, but no slouch either. I also have cable high speed internet. Prior to purchasing this camera two days ago, I had a Logitech Orbit and a Philips SB900 web cam running with no problems and a good clear picture with good audio when I did video conferencing through Skype. I loaded the software that came with the camera, which was Version 10.0. I started using Skype, and the first thing said to me was the pictured appeared somewhat blurred and the angle was very wide. I zoomed in some, but since the camera uses digital zoom, the picture became more blurred. The way to fix the problem was that I had to sit as closely to the desk as possible and lean in a little. When I did this, I was told that the picture was very clear. Now the bad - the software supplied with the camera is a RAM hog !! Part of the problem is that the software (not just the drivers, but the entire suite) used to run the camera is 130MB !! That is huge (for a USB webcam). The camera, while running in Skype caused my CPU usage to shoot to 85%. With the other two cameras it was normally around 25%. I then went to the Logitech site and downloaded version 10.0.4 of the Orbit MP software. While it dropped my CPU usage to around 25%-30%, my teleconferencing in Skype was terrible. The audio was distorted with bad latency, the picture was even worse than before, and my movement was extremely robotic. Then the worst thing happened...my computer rebooted on its own. After it rebooted completely, I logged back into Skype and in less that 10 minutes, it rebooted again !!! Needless to say, I disconnected the camera, uninstalled the software, and took the camera back to the store today. My recommendation is to stay away from the Orbit MP until Logitech fixes the bugs.

I tried both Microsoft's LifeCam VX-3000 and VX-6000. Had 'em both home and ran trials with my Intel Pentium D Dual Core 3.00GHz CPU with 2 gigs of ram and, with both of those, the video lagged the audio (distractingly so). Spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a friendly Microsoft customer service rep one evening (got through on their toll free line)and he pointed me to new software for the VX-6000. Downloaded the 50 meg plus file, installed it, but the VX-6000 still produced out-of-sync video vs. audio when I created a simple 640 by 480 video file for viewing on Media Player or editing in Windows Movie Maker.

So, I talked to some technicians at our company and then talked to the webcam guru at the local assembler that built my, I believe, excellent computer. All recommended Logitech when buying webcams. I then marched back to Best Buy and traded my $99 Microsoft VX-6000 for a Logitech Quickcam Orbit MP for BB's price of $139.95. You can find this Logitech unit cheaper all over the place, including, of course, here at Amazon. The package I bought included an inexpensive headset, which I haven't used so far.

Although I haven't tried the Orbit in a video phone call yet, from the moment I turned it on I had that satisfing good feeling that I bought a winner. Installed fairly easily with a couple of bumps. Got a "USB composite device has not passed Windows Logo testing" screen a couple of times..BUT..I received the SAME screen on, get this, the Microsoft cams! I just continued installing and have not experienced system problems so far.

The audio sync with video in making a recording is right on (remember, that was primary reason for taking back the Microsoft cameras) AND the picture clarity on my LCD flat panel monitor at the 640 webcam capture setting produced a gorgeous picture. Excellent detail and smoothness of video. Besides the superior audio sync with video, the Orbit MP is remarkably better than the VX-6000 and way above the $49 Microsoft VX-3000 in all other criteria too, in my opinion after comparison testing.

The Orbit's special effects are interesting and fun. The pan, tilt, etc., excellent. The face tracking is vigorous and alive - fun to watch the little Orbit camera turn - but I haven't tested in actual live conferencing yet.

All in all - for webcams, I'm now saying what more experienced webcam users told me - head for Logitech. They've certianly hooked me with their apparent superior performance. The Orbit MP is a keeper! Not going to waste anymore time searching and testing. And, my advice to Microsoft, you'd better talk to the outfit that bought your name for those Lifecams. I've relied on the Microsoft name on peripherals, keyboards, etc., and I've generally been very satisfied. But, in webcams, with me, the Microsoft brand now takes a back seat to Logitech.

Pros:

supurb video quality. cool effects, and motion tracking.

Cons:

video has a little lag in it. camera gets warm to the touch when idle. face tracking works good with a few glitches on timeing.

uses more cpu recorces then its previous unit.

Other:

works with only logitech software, 3rd party controls are not supported. audio has a little noise interferance, as a small echo or static once in a while.

Over All:

Good Camera with lots of features. not recommended for hard core video users.