New Toy

Getting a new gadget is always a headache. With all the understanding, reading up to do…
Where webcams are concerned, we’re noobs. With not much time to spare, we did it the anyhow way and got ourselves two sets of the Creative Live! Cam Voice instead of Logitech’s… for the following reasons:

• It’s Skype-certified (We know nuts about webcams, this piece of information is the decisive factor that got us to pull the NETS card out of our wallets for payment.)
• Wide-angled lens (Xian & I just loved this aspect… We just wanted to see more of each other (including each other’s living environment/background). More importantly, wide-angled is more useful when used for remote monitoring and motion detection. Cool!
• Adaptive Array Microphone technology for noise cancellation and echo reduction (This is important to me cos I’m very particular about the clarity issues – how irritating if you cannot hear and be heard clearly right?)
• Physical Flexibility (It offers 360 degress of horizontal and 65 degrees of vertical range which is impressive. Good for lazy bums like me, who knows if I wanted to talk while lying on my bed instead… then can adjust the cam accordingly. Hoho…)

I’m sure Creative do not have the best cams out there in the market, nor the best value-for-money ones. As far as I’m concerned, it's the only one out there (from among the cams we saw in Sim Lim Square) that offers the features we wanted.

Still haven’t got much time to play with it yet cos the installation took too long and we had to rush out to catch the “Blood Diamond” movie. The only gripe I had so far is the installation – the super long wait before I can play with it. It’s great to have lots of useful bundled applications and it’s quite slick to have the software perform an auto update to check for updated versions but the download is so sluggish that took me almost an hour for three updates totaling 55MB. Urgh! We still haven’t try the remote monitoring and motion detection aspect but the Skype sound and picture quality are good. The Directional Live Audio option, when turned on, was impressive as it minimized the music we blast from the side of the cam’s mic and we could hear each other clearly (music is not completely removed but is barely audible).