I kind of asked this in another thread, but it was probably posted in a bad place.

I understand that firewire sends data at a MUCH faster rate then USB 1.1, but I still don’t know the answer to the following…

What would be a better camera, a USB 1.1 that has a fps of 90 (like the Philips SPC900) or a firewire webcam at 30fps (like the Unibrain Fire-i)?

I do have the Philips SPC900 camera and it works great and the picture quality is excellent, but am wondering if a firewire camera would be better.

I read on this forum (haven’t seen this anywhere else) that this camera doesn’t send a true 90 fps, it’s actually sending the same frame 3 times (interpolated). Does anyone know if that’s true? Another thing I read is that USB cameras uses more system resources since the video is compressed first, while firewire uses much less cpu since the video is sent uncompressed. I noticed that the Philips SPC900 is very dependent on cpu, and on a lower speed processor, the camera won’t go higher then 30fps (even when it’s set on 90).

Does anyone have any insight on this? Firewire (low fps) vs. USB (high fps)? Maybe the USB would have better accuracy, but at a slower rate and the firewire would have lower accuracy at a faster rate? Are there other important factors other then fps?

Hi all…

Just stumbled upon this line of cameras,

Mightex CMOS Cameras

They look very promising in terms of low price/high frame rate.
Has anyone used one of these/heard anything about them?

I emailed them for more info, will post if I get anything relevant…

I am also wondering what the best camera is. I have heard that the Philips SPC900 goes at about 60fps in real life. It also seems to be good in low light. My only regard with it is that I don’t know how well it works on the Mac.

I don’t know about CMOS cameras, I think that for low light CCD is better. I could be wrong though.

If money was no object I would use Point Grey’s DragonFly Express at 200fps. It also has a Firewire 800 connection, so no delay there.

I’m using a dual core Athlon x2 @ 2.4ghz 2gb ram, and using a SPC900nc I can get 85fps at 320x240 and 58fps at 640 x 480 (max is 60fps at this resolution). The fps definitely depends on your cpu though. On a much slower system, the fps will go down.

I still haven’t found anyone to answer if the SPC900nc is doing a true 60, 75, 90 fps, or if it’s interpolated and sending the same frame multiple times (which makes it 90fps max). Someone posted that here, but nowhere on the net has written the same thing.

I still don’t know whether a firewire @ 30fps is better then a USB 1.1 @ 90/60fps.

Okay, so it does do about 90fps, just at a small size. I think I’ll be fine as long as the macam drivers are good, I’m running on a dual core 2.3GHz Power Mac G5 with 2.5GB RAM.

Kyle, I have OSX also installed on my same PC as above (I’m dual booting) and I just checked and the maccam drivers limit the fps to a max of 5 and you can’t change it. It also won’t let you change resolution (it’s permanently set on 320 x 240). I haven’t found a fix yet online. I tried searching. So the SPC900nc doesn’t look to have good drivers for mac. You might wanna try searching about this online (I will too). I’ll let you know if if find anything out about this. I saw some people say they use the Philips webcam for mac with Skype (but none of them mention the 5 fps problem).

Thanks for the heads up. I looked to see about it’s Mac compatibility earlier and I saw those Skype posts so I thought it must work decently. Well, it looks like you probably saved me $60-$65. I too will still look for some better Mac drivers.

Thanks again for the help.

I’m using the Philips SPC900 on a quad core Mac Pro, with an IOXperts driver. I’m not sure about peoples experience with it on a power mac, but on my Intel mac it is a bit buggy (mostly to do with camera initialization and preference recall), although it performs well when you mind its delicate code instability. I haven’t tested specifically to see if it sends duplicate frames, but at 640x480, I seem to be getting unique data every frame through an actionscript hack I’m using for blob motion capture. My Flash swf framerate is set to 60 fps, but the actual performance fps is more like ~40 to ~50 fps, but that mostly represents my actionscript performance.

There is a discussion thread on beta versions of the IOXperts driver (Click March 2007), so you can participate as a beta tester.

Thanks GoogolHz! I didn’t know about the beta drivers on IOXperts. I tried the non-beta one and it wouldn’t detect the camera. I’ll try the beta driver and see if that helps although I really only use OSX to test.

Yes, I second cerupcat, thanks GoogolHz! Maybe they will release a final driver for it soon. 40-50fps isn’t bad considering it’s beta and that most cameras sold are usually 30fps.

A great camera is the PtGrey Firefly MV. It’s 300$ which is fairly cheap for a high quality firewire camera. It captures at 640x480 @ 60fps. Also, it’s supported by Touchlib through the videowrapper ‘filter’ (vwcapture).

Yeah, I’ve been looking at the FireFly MV. It looks like a really nice camera. I think I might get one if no stable drivers come out for the SPC900NC.