Creative Webcam Live! Motion- Titanium

List Price: $123.99 Discount Price: $59.99

Features:

• Face-tracking Web Camera
• Unique tracking abilities
• Incredible value
• Capable of both pan and tilt motion
• One year warranty

Accessories:
Athenatech ACR801U20BLACK 8 In 1 Card Reader Black	SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer (SDV2-A-A30, Retail Package)	3-Year Extended Service Plan - Covers Electronic Items $0-$200 - Repair	Transcend Multi-Card Reader M1 - Card reader ( MS, MS PRO, MMC, SD, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, miniSD, RS-MMC, MMCmobile, MMCplus ) - Hi-Speed USB

Customer Reviews:

poor camera. very poor software [Posted on 2006-08-10]
The webcam is just like any other ordinary Logitech webcam. Nothing new or great about it. The description given by the manufacturer seems to claim that this is the best webcam in the world. Don't believe any word from the manufacturer. If you already have a webcam, don't re-invest in this.

The "face-recognizing" software is a joke. It takes any bright light ahead of the webcam as a "face". If two or more people stand in front of the camera, it goes crazy trying to figure out what to do and does what it can do best... hang or freeze. I had to close the software and restart it 7 times in an hour. I returned the webcam after using it for 2 days.

Will not install [Posted on 2006-10-20]
I tried to install this on 3 different computers, A Toshiba, a Sony and a voodoo. It will not install on any of them.

An excellent tool/toy [Posted on 2006-11-20]
I've owned this webcam for months and very satisfied so far. For such price I didn't expect anything remotely like Nikon DSLRs (hardware-wise), however it turned out that the light metering, shutter speed and aperture of this tiny thing are all quite right, even under some really complex lighting conditions. (I'm a long-time avid photographer) The zooming is digital but not optical, but then again it is really a consumer gadget targeted at mass-market.The video is reasonably smooth. The panning and tilting works well. The bundled software is quite impressive. Not necessarily the most cutting-edge computer vision algorithms are implemented, but it's really nice to see creative get quite a few applications featuring object detection and motion tracking. Some people complained the face detection didn't work out well for them. It's really not the hardware's fault but can be improved by employing some not-so-primitive, state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms in the software. That means we can always hope Creative to release more advanced software or even roll out our own (oops, the driver is closed-source, but there is workaround for this issue if one really wants to hack along...). Tip for a quick fix is: do not expose any object which has the similar colour and similar shape of your face to the webcam. This way, the software is not likely to get confused and will track your face well. I experimented with my hand in front of the cam, the little robot eye stared straight at my palm and followed it when I waved my hands. This tells that in the software, the rules defining a "face" is really primitive for now. (I wonder what will this little camera do when it sees an African whose face is nearly RGB(0, 0, 0), can it still track?) And I'd like to see a driver for Linux too. I run Debian most of the time recently, don't want to reboot to windows just in order to use this webcam.

The visual surveillance feature is cool. It suggests a really nice application possibility of this camera. Creative put these ideas together and created a decent and stylish UI for utilizing this little robot eye, appreciated here.

This cam looks good and is well built. It's especially cute when it does track your face's motion and stares straight at you, just like a cat or a little kid. The blue illuminated circles at each side looks modern and elegant.

I bought this cam for several reasons. My parents live far away from me, a webcam can be a great tool for our communication; My boyfriend is a hardcore researcher working on automatic video segmentation, feature recognition, etc. We are just curious about the trend of applications in the consumer market and how far have the consumer-oriented products gone, technology-wise. Creative webcam live motion's performance meets my need for a visual aid of the remote communication. As a practical tool it is more than adequate; Both my boyfriend and me had great fun when tweaking, cheating and playing with this little robot eye and we cannot wait to write our own applications for it. It is also a great toy. Thus 5 stars.

PS: Creative just released some really flashy software called "advanced video FX" for this camera, freely available from their website. Though not anything really that innovative, still a nice move. And I really hope they would release some SDK so that people can implement better algorithms for applications like remote monitoring, motion tracking...for this webcam.

The design of this Webcam has a terrible fault. [Posted on 2006-12-17]
The picture quality of this WebCam is good. However, this product has some terrible design faults. Unlike other Creative WebCam products, I cannot change the vertical angle of this WebCam. If I put this WebCam on the my LCD monitor, the WebCam lens is too high. If I put it on the desk, then the camera lens is too low. I will not buy this product. Instead, I will just buy a regular creative WebCam which only costs me $20~$30 while I can adjust both horizontal and vertical angle of the WebCam lens manually.

OK [Posted on 2007-07-21]
This was an OK product. However, the face tracking did not work as well the other cameras I tested.

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