Processing 1.0 - Processing Discourse - What webcams do you recommend?

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What webcams do you recommend? (Read 2224 times)

nickdatz

What webcams do you recommend?
Sep 26^th, 2006, 9:50pm

Hi,
I'm new at processing. I've been reading all the topics regarding video, but I couldn't find some kind of recommendation about what cameras work best with the environment. I'd like to get a decent web cam and do some sketching of ideas for a few months at least, and then after that *maybe* get a proper video camera (mini dv with firewire input or similar).

What webcam brands/models are known to be good for this kind of work? Image/drivers/configuration quality?

Thanks for your kind help.

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REAS

Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #1 - Sep 27^th, 2006, 4:32am

This is a very useful topic. Hopefully people will post what's working well for them. The answers are different for Mac and PC.

For PC, JMyron is the fastest library. I think there is a list of cameras that work for this library listed on their website. I think fewer cameras work with JMyron than with the Video library.

I don't have any passion or love for the two webcams I test things on, but they both work OK -- they are both mid-level Logitech cams.

njmcgee

Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #2 - Sep 27^th, 2006, 9:30am

I am also using a not so expensive logitech. I think its called 'Quickcam for Notebooks'. Picture isnt amazing but after all it is a webcam. Once i got WinVDIG sorted it has been working flawlessy with processing.

Played with an iSight yesterday, the picture looked a little nicer than my Logitech but it is more expensive.

http://njmcgee.wordpress.com

jesusgollonet

Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #3 - Sep 27^th, 2006, 10:17am

mid-level creative on a pc laptop here with no problems.

What do you want to experiment with?

If you want to do video effects, image grabbing and the like, i would go for the best image quality and framerate

If you are going to experiment with computer vision and video tracking, the most important thing that comes to mind is that you should be able to turn all automatic corrections off (auto-brightness, auto-contrast...). As you'll be tracking differences between pixels you don't want your camera to introduce artificial ones.

For computer vision, Zach Lieberman uses and recommends security surveillance cameras and a video capture card. They're slightly more expensive, but they usually lack automatic corrections, are harder to break (for installation usage) and give a much better framerate, i think.

http://www.jesusgollonet.com/blog

movax

Logitech Quickcam IM
Reply #4 - Oct 12^th, 2006, 9:55pm

I can verify that the Logitech Quickcam IM works fine on a WindowsXP PC, using Quicktime 7 and Vdig 1.01 (as reccomended in the Video Library FAQ).

I will report on the Mac OS X compatibility asap.

Using a 3.3ghz P4, the framerate is horrible at full size 640x480.

But there are ways of making it faster. One way is to display the webcam image in a mosaic effect, by running through every 4th, 8th or nth pixel of capture.pixels[] and drawing a rectangle of size 4, 8 or n. Or do things other than drawing rectangles here...

Flickr Stream of mostly Processing work:&&http://www.flickr.com/photos/87132003@N00/&&

movax Full Member Offline Posts: 172 Colorado	Re: What webcams do you recommend? Reply #5 - Oct 16^th, 2006, 2:57am Update: I got the Logitech Quickcam IM working on Mac OS X. I am using the macam driver : http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/ Using Quicktime 7.
	Flickr Stream of mostly Processing work:&&http://www.flickr.com/photos/87132003@N00/&&

nickdatz

Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #6 - Oct 25^th, 2006, 3:43pm

REAS wrote on Sep 27^th, 2006, 4:32am:

I don't have any passion or love for the two webcams I test things on, but they both work OK -- they are both mid-level Logitech cams.

Hey Casey, I'm back to this thread. I'm getting a logitech quickcam express to see if it works. What model of mid-level logitech cameras are you currently using

I found a list of tested hardware on WinVDIG's page, unfortunately there's not much to it. This is the link: http://www.vdig.com/WinVDIG/compatability.html

Thanks all for the replies.

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vpdf

Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #7 - Oct 26^th, 2006, 2:08am

Currently doing a work using Sony Eyetoy and Processing on OS X. I got it working! Haven't tested with any other OS yet.

Using a cvs build of macam, which (stroke of luck) works fine with JMyron. Howto and link to relevant macam build found here - http://www.nathanbolender.com/eyetoy/ - thanks nathan!

Everyone is talking, and so far I've tried the JMyron examples and got an image into Processing. It's a good thing.

nickdatz YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 27 uruguay	Re: What webcams do you recommend? Reply #8 - Oct 26^th, 2006, 5:21pm Just wanted to let you know, logitech quickcam chat is working here with Jmyron.
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Re: What webcams do you recommend?
Reply #9 - Nov 12^th, 2006, 8:39pm

Ive made good experiences with all cameras I tried, as soon as I got them running (with WinVDig 1.0.1 and QT6, incl. QT for Java).
Logitech seems to work fine.
I also tried a /very/ cheap no-name webcam, and it worked pretty nice (downloaded drivers from Microsoft). Advantage of low-fi webcams is that they ususally don´t have auto-functions so once you have calibrated them they don´t change the settings (focus, contrast, etc.)
Video camera (sony handycam), connected via firewire, also worked really nice. Careful, these cameras sometimes tend to auto-turn off after a certain time. -> leaving everything connected (firewire and power) helped
Never had problems with performance (though not having a fast computer - it´s 3 years old) if I don´t display the camera image. What slows everything down to a horrible framerate seems in fact to be displaying and not capturing. If you want to diplay the image, using the openGL library helps improve performance.
->import processing.opengl.*;
--
PS just connected a Logitech webcam - worked at once! with WinVDig1.0.1, Quicktime 7.1.3 and Processing 0121

« Last Edit: Nov 13^th, 2006, 11:36am by m »

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