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Topic: cameras for mac (Read 4686 times) |
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jen
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cameras for mac
« on: Oct 10th, 2004, 2:17am » |
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Hey I am looking for a web cam that is nice and cheap and mac compatable, I am not massively fussed about the image quality. What are other people using?
cheers
Jennie
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setpixel
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #1 on: Oct 10th, 2004, 4:41am » |
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ahh.. this topic again - and rarely well answered.
it seems that there really isnt a good really good resource/guide for cameras to use specifically for computer vision. i guess the reason is that its just not a very popular supject. people seem to ask me the question a lot - and i honestly dont know what to tell them.
i think many people would benefit from some kind of list of camera solutions whether it be digital cameras (usb/firewire for mac/pc/linux) or capture card+analog cam configurations. with - some kind of index as to price, usability, sensitivity, framerate, durability, image quality, usage (color/black^white(for infrared), etc. then - some editor's picks for the price, quality, and combination of price and quality.
i know its quite frustrating looking for this information - and people rarely share thier success stories with cameras publically. 
i cant help you with mac cameras, jen. but please - dont buy and isight. please. it is a shit camera. waaaaaaaaaaay overpriced too. $150USD for a webcam? who does apple think they are? oh. thats right, the people that control the sheep. but seriously, the ccd in that camera is terrible. it is horrible in low light conditions and contrary to its beautiful advertising, the image quality isnt that good. it only does up to 30 fps, and that is "up to". i cant give you a better solution unfortunately, but there are many other options much much greater than the isight.
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setpixel
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #2 on: Oct 10th, 2004, 5:34am » |
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you know how when steve jobs does his keynotes..
"alright - you are about to witness the future in video communication for the web.
we took the technology from a $20 usb webcam.
we made it larger and put it in a cool plastic case we call titanium.
we added a firewire interface so you know youre a suckah.
we've compared it to the cheapest, shittiest cameras around, and it is infact, marginally better.
it comes with 4 stands. thats right. 4. my engineers told me 3. i said, *sigh* "imagine how many starving babies will benfit from just one more stand.. NO ONE EATS OR SLEEPS UNTIL I HAVE FOUR. GET BACK TO WORK." you know that camera that attaches to the top of your laptop screen so its like you are looking into the camera? that was my idea. thats right. im a genius. now you can stand the camera up in more ways than you will ever care about.
all this for 150 dollars. thats only 300% more than comparable cameras.
you know what you have to do. don't go and ask the wife. apple is your addiction and she doesnt respect that. go ahead. pull the trigger."
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jen
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #3 on: Oct 10th, 2004, 9:25am » |
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ahh yes the isight sucks respose.
yeah I have heard that one alot before.
Basically I am looking for something ANYTHING that
is going to work at present . At least then I could proptype up stuff and
do testing at least ! But nope I cant seem to find any sort of collective take on the issue anywhere. It is true about the computer vision topic I think it will become more popular soon ! And also the lack of a sharing comunity around computer vision all the forums on teh subjest that I try and interact in are app pretty cagey.
Ahh well any ideas on this at this point would rock out
cheers
Jennie
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michael05
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #4 on: Oct 10th, 2004, 11:40am » |
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i have got an isight and a logitech quickcam pro 4000. they are both not ideal. the quickcam has only a max 320x240 resolution. it should produce 640x480 but it does not. the quality is much lower that the isight's. it was 90 euros. the isight cost me 125 dollars. thats nearly the same.
at the institute i have a very small vrmagic camera (http://www.vrmagic.de/vrmtech/camera/vrmc_d.html). the quality is really good. but it does not work with vdig.
did you try to use another api than quicktime/vdig for the camera input? i tried jme. but it does not work at all with the quickcam and the vrtech. isn't there a better alternative?
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°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
http://www.m05.de
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sspboyd
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #5 on: Oct 12th, 2004, 8:24pm » |
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I have used an old logitech webcam, iSight, and a several different firewire DV cameras. The DV cameras are far and away the best in terms of image size and quality.
The webcam is fine if the lighting is good and you are not doing motion detection. When I tried doing motion detection with the webcam the amount of noise in the video created a lot of false positives.
The iSight was unusable. The image quality was good but it gave me 1fps in P5 v.68 Maybe that's changed with updates to the iSight firmware and/or java updates, but I haven't checked.
hth
steve
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gmail.com w/ sspboyd username
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diriccio
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Re: cameras for mac
« Reply #6 on: Oct 13th, 2004, 3:29am » |
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i'm using a friend's isight, after having spent quite some time as well searching for other cheap cam solutions for mac.
the isight after all just works (os x 10.3.5, java 1.4.2, p68 ). no 1fps-problem here.
the only thing is that it seems to only work in 320x240 with the jMyron-tracking extra. not sure if that's a general problem or isight specific. didn't get response in an earlier thread - people seem to be quite incommunicative about this topic indeed. so, if anyone knows more about this...
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