The stand for the Optia series is well designed. It fits easily on a flat panel or on a flat surface. There is a tong which can be rotated out to hold it in place if used on a notebook computer. The camera does rotate a small amount from side to side but not as much as I would like.

The cameras can be rotated vertically about 300 degrees. Past the vertical up position the image is inverted so it remains right side up if pointed away from you. If pointed directly down the camera shuts its image off, the blue lamp shuts off but the camera continues sending a black video signal to the computer. This allows you to black out the image without creating errors in your webcam software.

One good thing about the mounting of certain Creative cameras: (Voice, IM Pro, Ultra) They can be swiveled and tilted both side to side and forward and backward, making it easy to compensate for odd angles and positions of your monitor or whatever they sit on.

I really dislike the installation process for the Creative cameras.

Each time you do an install, whether for a new camera or any other Creative product, you are asked the same set of questions. You have to select the world region, country and language each time. I think they should first attempt to retrieve that information from the Windows registry where it is already set by the basic installation of Windows, or at least from previous Creative product installations.

During the installation process there are numerous screens that popup and close. One of them has the words "click exit to finish" which appears quite some time before the installation is complete. Several times I clicked exit prematurely because I thought the software was finished.

It is quite annoying when you are presented with a screen to register your product. If you chose cancel, the registration program runs anyway. The software auto update has the same aggravating sequence of having to select your country, and language. Why don't they pull that from the original installation of the products?

I do not choose to install the extra features software when first connecting the cameras. The Creative update displays several program updates for those I do not install, and lists them as critical! The average person would install those without thinking or realizing they are things he didn't want to begin with.

During a software update, it appears that the process is installing the software, then it asks if you want to proceed with the installation. Turns out that screen was the download process not the install process. If I had not wanted to proceed with the installation I wouldn't have run the software update in the first place. So I click OK and am then told I need to uninstall the previous driver before installing the new software. These redundant and overlapping requests for what should be a simple process makes me rate the driver install process of Creative products, very poor. At least the average user will only have to go through this occasionally. I had to do it 6 times this morning as I was installing several cameras.