Quickcam Messenger : Review / Downloads

The quickcam looks and feels sturdy. If you're after a fairly budget webcam with basic functionality including a micrphone, this webcam will do the job terribly well. For the price, it's probably hard to fault the messenger. This short review will outline good and bad points of the webcam, and provide a driver download.

OVERALL:

4/5

• Great microphone (with USB connection)
• Excellent software - easy to use
• Sturdy unit
• Reasonable picture

Driver Download :

Quickcam Messenger version 8.4.8 Windows

Quickcam messenger drivers for Mac 8.4.8

1. What can you expect?

The webcam does not come in a box, but it's packed well. The unit itself comprises a stand and a ball-shaped webcam, with a small button on top for taking snapshots. It's quite a heavy little unit, which is great because it means it'll sit on your desk without toppling over.

You can also rotate the head to almost any angle you like, though you cannot point the webcam directly upwards.

2. Picture quality

The picture we got was reasonable - pretty standard for this specification of webcam. We found it was slightly better at close up shots than filming from some distance. See our attached photos for more information on what sort of picture to expect from the webcam.

Here I'm using the software supplied by logitech to take a photo. The camera's 1.3 megapixels, so it isn't going to be as good a quality as your digital camera probably. However, for videos and live chat, it's fine.

3. Software

The drivers are really straight forward to install - just put the CD in the drive and select 'install drivers', the computer does the rest. Once you've plugged the webcam in after restarting you'll see a little icon in the corner of the screen showing you that the camera's connected. It'll also help by checking updates for software every once in a while. Updated drivers make a big difference to a camera's performance, so this is quite important.

The first thing you get when you re-start your computer is a friendly logitech hello, checking to see if the camera works. Luckily mine did first time, so I saw the following (image is slightly compressed)

Do I look miffed, or what?

After clicking Next, you're ready to go.

Actually, although I was a little sceptical at first, the software provided by this is really very good. It comes with a little video recording suite which makes it dead easy to record videos and suchlike.

To record a new video, you just have to click "Capture a new picture or video" and it'll take care of the rest for you. It saves the files in AVI format which are relatively small (you can probably compress them in another programme if you want). See my other page for software if you're interested.

You click the button and up comes a preview screen. You can also flick between videos quite easily. This is great if you want to publish something to You Tube or send videos to friends for example.

4. Sound

The sound's really a selling point on this webcam. It's got a built-in microphone that's pretty darn good not only because it picks up sound from your entire room (see my little video tour), but beacuse it's a USB one. This means you don't have to fiddle around with plugging it into the microphone jack, and the quality is much better than the others.

5. Overall

A nice piece of kit : The image you get can vary enormously depending on the light in the room. Although this isn't the best quality picture, the microphone is excellent. The software is also really simple to use and makes creating videos and pictures a lot easier. The sturdy base makes the unit feel more expensive than it is, too.