Hey

I’ve been thinking about getting a new webcam to play around with. I’d like one with better quality and more than the 15 fps my old one has at VGA(640x480). It’s just hard to find any reasonably priced quality webcams. I’d like to have firewire and at least 30 fps at VGA resolution.

I had a look on the Philips SPC 900NC and ended up on a danish hardware site that had some reviews. While user reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt, one of them scared me a bit. He wondered how such a relatively cheap webcam could do 90 and 60 fps. After some testing, he found out that the camera appearantly uses interpolation at 30 fps and so just repeats every frame 3 times when running at 90 fps. Same thing at 60 fps. I have no valid source but it does make you think, since the 2nd cheapest cam I could find doing just 60 fps at VGA is a camera from theimagingsource.com which is 290 euros. I might be wrong but it sounds fishy indeed. I’d also like to have a firewire cam instead to save CPU usage.

The next thing I had a look at was the Unibrain Fire-i. It’s firewire, uncompressed, has great quality and the cheapest firewire cam I could find. At the moment it is out of production because it’s being updated but it should be back on the shelves in a revised version by the end of this month(february 07). Has anybody tried this cam out? It’s still quite expensive compared to a USB cam that’s only a bit worse because of compression. I saw in a review that the Fire-i can only do 15 fps at VGA, is this true? In that case it would be useless to me. I think I’ll send Unibrain a mail to hear about what they changed.

The last thing I found was theimagingsource.com. They make industrial firewire cams at the lowest prices I could find. Ive had a look on these webcams:
http://www.theimagingsource.com/en/products/cameras/firewire_color/1-99-99.htm
The price is high, cheapest cam is 220 euros. If this is the way to go I’d rather shell out the extra 70 euros for 60 fps instead of 30 though. It’s a lot of money for a camera but I guess I’d never have to worry about it again. Anybody tried these?

Point Grey also has some interesting stuff but I saw somebody in here paid 900$ for a cam which is waaay over my budget. The one from theimagingsource.com already is but only a little bit.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: duh, just found this page
http://www.unibrain.com/Products/VisionImg/tSpec_Fire_i_DC.htm
Frame rates (fps) 30 15 7.5 3.75
Video Modes
640x480 RGB-24 (24 bits) — X X X
640x480 YUV 4:2:2 (16 bits) — X X X
640x480 YUV 4:1:1 (12 bits) X X X X

Anybody knows exactly what the difference between these modes are?

The Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 appears to do 30fps @ 640x480.  It also has a wide angle lens, and is reasonably easy to open up and remove the IR filter from its lens.

It is a USB 2.0 device, and is about $100 USD.

bbatchelder: have u successfully removed the ir filter from the microsoft lifecam? If so can you post instructions? I have one on the way.

I’ve taken apart the Lifecam VX 6000

See instructions in Here

Please post things related to modifying your webcam here, in the cam modification / lens section.

ALJ - 16 February 2007 01:08 PM

Point Grey also has some interesting stuff but I saw somebody in here paid 900$ for a cam which is waaay over my budget. The one from theimagingsource.com already is but only a little bit.

I’ve used a Pointgrey Firefly (the legacy cam) firewire cam last year for my graduation project and it was great!  30fps 640x480 works great, it’s really great in low-light situations and it was especially useful since it seems to enhance lines (like embossing an image), it sort of makes all contrasts/lines extra visible.  In my project this was very useful since I was using marker-recognition (augmented reality), perhaps the enhancing feature is also usefull for a multitouch display?

I agree that the pointgrey cams are expensive but they generally sell kits which contain more than you actually need, I believe.  It’s difficult to find good price quotes since Pointgrey obviously doesn’t want that, but judging from this site it should be possible to get the Firefly2 bare cam for about $200.

Hope this was useful, I’m just sharing my experience with the Firefly cam and I’m not at all well-versed in what else is out there in the world of cams.

bombarie - 02 March 2007 10:26 AM

ALJ - 16 February 2007 01:08 PM

Point Grey also has some interesting stuff but I saw somebody in here paid 900$ for a cam which is waaay over my budget. The one from theimagingsource.com already is but only a little bit.

I’ve used a Pointgrey Firefly (the legacy cam) firewire cam last year for my graduation project and it was great!  30fps 640x480 works great, it’s really great in low-light situations and it was especially useful since it seems to enhance lines (like embossing an image), it sort of makes all contrasts/lines extra visible.  In my project this was very useful since I was using marker-recognition (augmented reality), perhaps the enhancing feature is also usefull for a multitouch display?

I agree that the pointgrey cams are expensive but they generally sell kits which contain more than you actually need, I believe.  It’s difficult to find good price quotes since Pointgrey obviously doesn’t want that, but judging from this site it should be possible to get the Firefly2 bare cam for about $200.

Hope this was useful, I’m just sharing my experience with the Firefly cam and I’m not at all well-versed in what else is out there in the world of cams.

This was very useful, exactly the kind of info I was looking for, thanks. I might go for a Unibrain that does 640x480 at 30 fps via FireWire. It’s a bit expensive though.