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Creative Live Ultra Notebook,
Purchased July 14, 2005, $99.99

This is a good camera, if given a decent balance of white or mixed colors within the frame. The available settings for color adjustment, as is with most of the Creative cameras, is restricted to Auto, Incandescent, Florescent and Outdoor. If you change the color settings, it may take a minute or so for the camera to show any major change. During my initial testing phase, I was getting frustrated with a very red color balance that I couldn't seem to get past. I was about to give the camera a bad color review when I thought about the fact that I was sitting here in my red long johns and that might be having an effect. Then I put on a white shirt, which brought the overall image color right in line. From this experiment it appears the camera looks at an area near the center of the image, assumes that is your face, and tries to make that color flesh tone. If you have color balance problems, try a different color shirt or get much closer to the camera so your face fills the center of the image and see what happens.

The camera has good low light sensitivity and now that I have the color problem figured out I'm quite pleased overall. This camera has a wide angle lens which seems to be very popular with the webcam makers right now. I don't have any problem with the wide angle lenses, but they do require you to use a larger image to be seen easily, taking up more bandwidth. At the time of this writing (Sep. 2005) about 50% of the households connected to the Internet in the US now have broadband of some sort.

Creative seems to have solved the mounting problem I reported with the earlier notebook camera. This one clamps nicely to my notebook screen and stays put. I do wish it had a horizontal swivel though. You still have to sit directly in front of the camera. At least the mount allows me to place the camera anywhere along the top of my notebook screen, the previous camera would only fit in a few spots.

This is a true USB 2 camera, but I find that it appears to have a maximum speed of roughly 15 frames a second when used with a 640x480 image, at least that is my impression in viewing the preview window in my ConquerCam program. If you are going to make full use of the frame update speed, I recommend you turn preview off unless you need it. With preview on, about 50% of my notebook computer's processor power is occupied managing the preview image. With preview off, or the application minimized, only about 1% is used by the camera except when it captures a still image, then it jumps to about 10%, and some of that is most likely the uploading of the file.

This camera is a good improvement to the earlier Creative Notebook Camera and I am giving it high ratings all round. My new best pick for a portable camera. Screen shots of camera configuration settings
Advanced         Device         Extended

Sample images showing how this camera performs under different lighting conditions
See a 640x480 image taken under plenty of light
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