Pros: Feels like you are in the same room as the person you are viewing.
Cons: having to adjust the settings was a bit of a pain at first.
The bottom line: I would recommend this webcam because it really does what it says on the box, and is good value for money too!
Due to my old webcam falling off the computer table and cracking I decided I would upgrade to a better one. I think webcams are a brilliant invention and makes chatting to friends online so much more personal.

First of all some of you who are reading this may be new to all of this internet malarkey and may have no clue as to what a webcam is. For those people I will endeavour to explain, don’t worry I’m not a tech head so there won’t be a lot of jargon that you won’t understand!

A webcam is a small digital camera which plugs into your pc/laptop via a USB cable. You can use it as I do to have a face to face chat with friends on messenger services such as MSN live messenger (incidentally the best one to use with this cam) or Yahoo messenger and Skype. Or you can use it for a variety of other purposes which I will describe as we read on.

This particular webcam, the Microsoft Lifecam vx-6000 comes in a nice red box with tells you it is optimized for Windows live Messenger (to get this service you can download it here - http://get.live.com/messenger/overview ) It’s free and simple to use. The camera itself is a small round silver grey camera set up upon a round base. The base can also be opened to allow you to attach it to top of PC/Laptop. It swivels around 360 and also tilts up and down so that wherever you are sitting at your desk then the camera can be on you. The wide angle lens on the camera takes in quite a lot (71to be precise) and is very clear and fast, this means you really feel like you’re in the same room as the person talking. (Both my friend and I bought the same camera and we can chat real time with each other) And as the camera also has an inbuilt microphone this makes for a much better hands free conversation! The quality of sound is pretty good, and it also cancels out acoustic noise.

You also have 3x digital zoom which means you can close in on a subject and let whoever is viewing you see something more close/clear. I’ve used this when showing my friend a card my daughter made me and she said it was as clear as if she was looking at it in her own hand.
When using this webcam in Windows Live Messenger you can turn on auto face tracker mode, to do this simply invite your friend on MSN to view your cam, then you will see on the bottom of the webcam screen a little box with stars in it…this is the dashboard. This is where you can turn on/off the face tracker, which simply means if you move away from the camera slightly then the camera will follow your face. I don’t use this feature much but have done so a couple of times. Another feature which is very fun to use and great when chatting to other friends who have kids, is the effects on the dashboard…by clicking on each effect you can add a bee, kite, stars, and many more others…all animated little icons to your live webcam. This is a fun feature and you can even look as if you’re trying to lick an ice cream cone! There are 37 effects in total so have fun playing around.

The zoom feature is also on the dashboard and by clicking and holding the zoom in or out button you can get it to your preferred distance. (Great for hiding that zit that appeared lol) By clicking on the drop down arrow at the top right hand corner of the dashboard you can go into properties, this is where you can make changes to the settings, for example I had to change the colour when I first got the cam as it appeared too red and bright for me. You will probably have to play about with it to get the desired effects. This again is quite simple once you’ve found it (all of the instructions come in the box, but I can never be bothered reading them) You can also choose to make your cam picture black and white. This is just some of the features the camera has.

You can get a livecall quickly too by using the button on top of the webcam (a little picture of the world with a telephone on top) this will bring up your MSN messenger box onscreen and a list of all people who are online on your buddy list…you simply select the person you want to have a cam call with and hey presto off you go. (The other person has to accept of course)

Not only can you chat live to friends you can also use the webcam to capture video clips (quality isn’t going to be worthy of an award but isn’t too bad) I’ve used this to record my children singing happy birthday for a friend and then emailing it to her, this is such a nice personal way instead of sending an ecard! You can also take still pictures with the camera which can take up to 5MP photos. I have only really used this once or twice as I already have a digital camera so don’t really need to use this one for taking stills, although they do turn out not too bad (as long as you have your settings right) You can also take just audio clips using the webcam’s microphone.

To capture video, audio or photographs you have to click on the Microsoft Lifecam icon on your desktop (or wherever you have saved it to) You can find it by clicking –Start - All Programs – Microsoft Lifecam. A box will appear and it will say connecting, then you will appear on screen, above your mugshot are 3 buttons, one with a camera (to capture still photos) second with a microphone on it (to start/stop audio clips) and the third with a film reel (to obviously capture movie clip) at the top right of the screen is another button (a blue square with an arrow pointing up and another pointing right) this is where you can change the resolution of the webcam and of the still camera. The webcam has the ability to go up to 1.3MP resolution but I tend to stick at about 320x240 or 352x288 as the camera seems to slow down when used on 1.3MP.

On the top left of the screen is the dashboard (the little box with stars in again) and at the bottom right is another 3 buttons where you can click to email your photo/clips, second button is to post your clip to Windows Live Spaces (should you want to) and the third button is to open your saved Lifecam files.

I almost forgot to mention that you get all the software you need to install the webcam and it is very straightforward! Just follow onscreen prompts and go!

Ok enough about the features although I am very impressed by them. I will go into techy mode for all of you technoheads out there!

If you don’t need to know the system requirements then you can skip this part.

Operating System - Windows Vista® or Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2)
Hard Drive – 300mb Free
USB Port 2.0
Intel Pentium® III 700 MHz (Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz recommended) or higher.
256 MB of RAM or higher.
CD-ROM drive
Display adapter capable of 16-bit color depth or higher, 2 MB or higher video memory.
Audio: Windows-compatible speakers or headphones
Internet functions (post to Windows Live™ Spaces, send in e-mail, video calls) also require: Broadband (cable, DSL, or other), modem, Internet Explorer® 6 or later browser software (required for installation), 25 MB hard-drive space typically required (users can maintain other default Web browsers after installation), and access to the Internet through MSN® or another Internet service provider (ISP).
(information taken from Microsoft website)

Price – I got my camera from Amazon(UK) using vouchers from various other survey/review sites. The price I paid brand new was £45(GBP) and was, I thought very good value for what I got!
I think this is the cheapest I have seen it too…as I did have a look at some other retailers when deciding which camera to go for.
I have looked on Amazon(US) to see if the price is similar and find it is $68.99(USD) It does pay to shop around though so if you know of any websites/stores that you may get it cheaper from then try them first.

I hope that this review has been in any way helpful to anyone thinking about buying a webcam if you have any more questions I will do my best to answer!

Thanks for reading
Michelle June2007©