1. c-had
   Developer

   There's been a lot of talk about what webcam is good to use with Pear Note. Unfortunately, most webcams available today have very poor quality video when compared with the iSight that comes built into all of our Macbooks. That said, this is not the case with all webcams.

   I just acquired a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro, and the video quality is actually very good. To my eye, it's better than the built-in iSight. The microphone built into it is not bad either, though it's somewhat muddy. I've also found the Mac driver that comes with OS X to be a little buggy, but as long as the video gets started it seems to work fine. Hopefully Apple will improve the driver soon.

   That said, it's still the best option I've found. So, if you're looking for an external webcam to use with Pear Note, I'd recommend it.

   Posted 1 year ago #

2. c-had
   Developer

   Sadly, I have to take back this recommendation. After further testing, I've found that the driver issues are worse than I thought. The camera definitely has excellent video quality, but it will stop working occasionally. I'm trying to work around this as best I can (the beginnings of this can be found in the new beta release, 1.2.3b1). If you're trying to use this camera, here are a few things to keep in mind:

   1) All USB ports are not created equally. On my Macbook, the back USB port is on a dedicated USB bus while the front USB port is shared with other devices. Consequently, I get much better reliability from the back USB port.
   2) CPU load can affect the webcam driver. I can make the camera stop working much more quickly by running other processor intensive applications while recording.

   I'd appreciate hearing other people's experiences as well regarding this or other webcams.

   Thanks,
   Chad

   Posted 1 year ago #

3. thebimbo
   Member

   Hi, new here and by chance happened to see a post (on a German web site) today about a new "HD" webcam from MS coming out on September 9th, 2009, price ca. $80 or less. As there is no product number mentioned I couldn't find an English-language version of this but maybe of interest to some of you, as it mentions that there will be OS X drivers. I'm likely to buy one (to match my Dell monitor on Mac Pro, my old iSight is to be retired as it heats too much) and I'll report back...

   http://www.golem.de/0908/68892.html

   Translation:
   http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2F0908%2F68892.html&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

   Posted 1 year ago #

4. c-had
   Developer

   I'm very interested to hear how well it performs, so I look forward to your report.

   Posted 1 year ago #

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