The box feels heavy and solid, the cover is pretty well designed, nothing special in anyway. Upon opening it, the styrofoam box was bursting its contents, with namely three things inside, the camera tube, the stand and the extender arm.

The manual is skimpy and would be better described as an information leaflet with no colour and obviously no effort put into it, although with such webcams, nothing could be simpler than fixing it in and plugging it to the USB port at the back. Being a visual person, I only consult the manual as a last resort, however I think this still bears repeating! A great product can be ruined by two things, namely its manual and the company's techincal support.

Without much ado, let's see if the PC Vision 300USB can prove itself as a great product!

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The Good

The Installation, Driver feature and Programs

The unit comes with a green LED which lights up when the unit is on or in operation. The switch for the webcam is located at the back of the camera, you simply have to slide it in to start the camera, it's that simple. Being a USB device, it is hot plug and to intentionally test this out, I waited for Windows 98 to load before I plugged the camera in and switched it on. It was detected as an unknown device but within 5 minutes, everything was set-up and all ready for some serious work!

The swivel extender arm is an excellent idea, for which you can tilt the camera to any funny position. The camera base works fine however it does not have a non-slip pad (you know, those stuff on the bottom of your mousepad?), and since webcams go on top of the monitor, it may start slipping down, which is bad! Also, no lens cover was included and the manual did mention something about not exposing the lens to direct sunlight. Bad bad move, as my PC is located in front of the window, which means that I've got to cover the windows with curtains before I can do some video-capture/video-conference in the day time!

The installation screen

System Requirements:-

• Pentium 100MHz or compatiable (with USB port)

• 16MB RAM

• SVGA display card with at least 2MB Video RAM

• Microsoft Windows 98

• 20MB free harddisk space

It really makes me think when I look at the system specifications, and I wonder if they're simply placed there for the fun of it. Microsoft specified that for optimum performance, Windows 98 should be run with at least 32MB RAM and at least a Pentium 166MMX machine. With that, I guess Windows 95 OSR2 (with USB support) can't be used, but in any case, I didn't try this on a Windows 95 machine.

There is a slight and noticable pause when you swtich on the webcam, I guess this is due to the initialisation of the webcam's drivers. The webcam's properties are not available until the it is powered on. I have included a screenshot of the Device Manager.

Device Manager

Programs Included & Ease of Use

Since installation is such a breeze, usage was also nonetheless easier. This webcam came bundled with EasyXpress Video Mail and InternetPhone with video, as well as Microsoft VidCap and TrueView USB capture. Let's see what each program is meant for!

The VocalTec Internet Phone software is inlcuded for you to make phone calls over the internet, and see the person talk, much like video conferencing albeit this is a one-to-one affair and the other party needs to have a webcam as well as the same software.

TrueView USB capture is one of two included video capture software. I would recommend using this if you like the simple interface involved, not much complication unlike Microsoft VidCap which requires some fiddling around and getting used to before some serious video capture. Also this has the preview image in a separate screen, so I would only use this program for small scale capturing, for example resolutions of 160 x 120. For larger screens, it would be better to use VidCap because the controls aren't hidden away by the big preview screen. Click on any of the images to get a close-up view.

The Bad

Generally, there are few bad points about this webcam, in fact there are only three that I can think of right now. Well the images are a bit grainy, check out the image of the Xircom PCMCIA modem card below, and with a bit of tweaking here and there, I did manage to make it clearer, but after the image was saved, it was still just as blur, definitely one big downside! Also, the preview window shows nice and smooth previews, but during capture, there was a large amount of frames dropped, it could be due to my harddisk, but I'm not too sure about that. The last downside would be the focus of the lens, it takes a long time to focus the lens because the blue rubber cap that surrounds the lens feels very loose and does not get a good grip on the lens, hence, you could be turning it from morning to night, and yet the lens would still not be focused! Check out the two images I captured with the camera below.

The Xircom PCMCIA modem [taken at night]

Nokia 6110 handphone

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Test System Configuration

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Conclusion

This definitely isn't a professional video capture device and never should be regarded as one, however credit goes to MediaForte for making the PC Vision 300USB different in terms of styling and practicality. The swivel arm does indeed make positioning the camera easier. The price is quite reasonable for a camera with its capabilities, but I should think that the images are way to grainy, maybe MediaForte could look into this, but this is a fair and commendable effort on a webcam!

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