T M T

Can’t resist the temptation and finally got me an iSight camera from Apple. Again, it is a thing of design beauty. It’s probably the only webcam that uses a 3-piece glass lens system with auto-focus, auto-exposure, and 1/4 inch CCD instead of the cheap plastic and CMOS stuff.

One firewire cable provides audio, video link as well as power. Three types of mounting device covers just about every possible senario – laptop, flatscreen, and desktop. I just used the magnetic mount to sit the iSight camera very securely on top of my 20 inch Dell LCD.

Other nice little touches include the “on-air” LED and rotating lens cover plus on/off switch. You got to love it – even with a steep price of $149.

OK, enough glow about my implusive splurge. Here comes the problem. The iSight camera works out of the box with my Mac Mini with the iChat software – that’s it. Since very few (none) people on my buddy list owns a Mac, and iChat doesn’t work quite as well with other Windows clients, I feel like the first guy with the Fax machine.
After one sweaty night, here is my discovery:

1. iChat video works with other iChat or AIM 5.9. But AIM 5.9 video is a fixed smallish window and the quality sucks.
2. iChat video doesn’t work with the new AIM version called Triton.
3. MSN Messenger has OS X client, but it’s text-only;
4. Skype has an OS X client, but it is only version 1.5beta, no luck with Video. Video was introduced as a beta since V2.X on Windows side only;
5. iSight doesn’t have a driver for WindowsXP. There’s actually a bounty offered for the first hacker to create a driver for it.
   Windows can still recognize iSight as a 1394 desktop webcam. The built-in noise-suppression microphone won’t work. And the auto-exposure and auto-focus functions won’t work quite as well which requires manual adjustment.
6. Finally, for now the best option seems to be using Skype 2.5 on Windows and plugin another $10 cheapo microphone for the audio. Skype does a good job of allowing full-screen video conferencing. Not quite as fansy as iChat to iChat, but works with most of my buddies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Toy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.