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smpitaFlag for United States of America

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Shopping for webcam and looking for suggestions.

I'm building a spare no expense computer for a client of mine and he wants a webcam. First priority is framerate. If the video isn't smooth, he's not going to like it (and yes, I am aware about light levels affecting performance.) Second is clarity.. a little bit of grainy would probably be passible if it's needed for performance. Camera can be USB 2 or 1394 for use on an Opteron 3400+ running Windows XP 64.

Links to pages with stats would be extremely useful.

Thanks all!
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Callandor
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Here's a webcam shootout: http://www6.tomshardware.com/consumer/20040910/

But if you want the highest quality and can afford it, there's nothing that will compare with a camcorder - it will beat any webcam: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/video/20041008/
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innovator_joel

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Is there a specific camcorder that you might suggest? Cost is not the issue.

Thanks,
Sean
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Callandor
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I have a Logitech quickcam pro 4000. It does a 640x480 image and works pretty well for doing video conferencing and simple monitoring.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/US/EN,CRID=2204,CONTENTID=5042

I've also got one of the Axis network cameras in my datacenter that cost 3 times as much and except for the fact i don't need a pc the quality is not much better.

It really depends on what he is going to use it for. If he needs pro quality video feed then yeah he needs a camcorder. something like the optura 30 even comes with software that allows it to be used as a usb webcam. Great quality but i hate letting a $800 camcorder do the job that the $100 logitech can do.