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Creative Live Ultra, Purchased March 13, 2005, $89.99
A good camera overall. I am seeing many improvements over earlier cameras. This one has a wide angle lens and comes with a headset rather than a built-in microphone. It is USB 2.0 compliant and does a good job of keeping up with a 640x480 resolution at 30 frames a second as long as your computer can handle the high data rate.
The color is quite good and realistic, even though it doesn't have a manual color balance slider. Its exposure does quite well in bright light and in very low light. My daylight only lighting setup tends to overdrive most cameras, but the Live Ultra handles the bright side of my face quite well with very little white level clipping.
For some reason my captured images had considerable jpg artifacts in them (pixelization in fine detail). I am not sure if this was caused by the camera drivers or my capture program. I tried capturing the images directly from the camera but those had some of the same artifacts while not quite as bad.
One drawback, which I am seeing on all the Creative cameras of this generation, is the mounting support. It works well on a flat panel monitor or notebook screen, but when folded and sitting on a flat surface, like a desktop or shelf, it is quite difficult to get the camera to sit still. It keeps twisting due to the stiffness of the cable. The mount is not removable without really pulling hard which could damage the camera. Then there is no practical way to mount the camera some other way such as on a tripod.
While this is not the best camera within its price range, it is a good choice for a wide angle camera.
Screen shots of camera configuration settings
Advanced Settings
Device Settings
Extended Settings
 | Sample images showing how this camera performs under different lighting conditions |