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Thursday, September 09, 2004

Apple iSight woes

I picked up an Apple iSight camera, mostly because it was autofocus. I figured I could use it as a firewire video source for some projects, and with iChat/AIM.

Unfortunately, it's been something of a disappointment. The two major problems I have with it are:

1. Requires a LOT of light. If you're not in a brightly lit office, don't bother getting one. From what I've seen the Griffin [SightLight] helps, but not as much as you might hope.

2. Fixed base. While it comes with bases for mounting on LCDs/Laptops and monitors, they're fixed. With the angle my monitor and chair are at, you can't see my head - it points down at my chest. The MacMice [SightFlex] is a good solution for this, but unfortunately you can't combine it with the Griffin SightLight.

It's a very nice camera. For some people, it's worth $140. For most, it's not. While it integrates well with iChat, for some reason iChat does not let you modify the camera settings for brightness, etc. that all other QuickTime based capture programs do. QuickTime provides this settings dialog and handles all of the hard stuff itself. Why this feature is missing is beyond me. A third part hack, [iChatUSBCam], allows you to modify the iSight's settings but the functionality really should have been there in the first place.

9/09/2004 03:42:00 PM ] [  0 comments  ]
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