When hunting for your ideal webcam there are things to concern yourself with and things to ignore, we'll start with the latter. Why bother with a mega pixel resolution webcam if your messenger service can only send 640 x 480 pixels? Sure you can take photos at 2 mega pixels with some webcams but they are not a digital camera replacement and often have cheap / read poor optics.

So when hunting for a good webcam you needn't have a massive budget, our subject for today is the Quickcam Pro 5000 webcam from Logitech. Priced at around £35 it's unlikely to break the bank but this little baby is feature packed. For a start you can get a full frame rate streamed smoothly at 640 x 480 pixels and you'd be amazed how many cams still can't do that meaning you look like Max Headroom (for those of us that can remember him). Then there is low light performance, it's rare that you are in a perfectly lit room when making a video call or MSN chat, so Logitech have equipped the Pro 5000 with a VGA light sensor that constantly adjusts the contrast and other image settings to try and achieve the best balance. This works well although it can be defeated if you sit in front of a bright backlight.

The optics are remarkably good for a webcam of this price presenting a clear and focused image, the picture gets better still in good lighting conditions and the whole package is capable of taking still images up to 1.3 mega pixels, however this relies on some software manipulation. The other software reliant feature is the face tracking technology that Logitech have deployed in most of their recent web cams. This is used to good effect in the Pro5000 and it works very well indeed keeping us centred on screen despite a fair bit of moving around while using MSN. This feature does degrade the image a bit but given the quality of the image to start with it's something you can live with or disable if you must.

The built in microphone does a good job but is no substitute for an outboard boom or headset, however for most users it will suffice for basic webcam chats. Logitech have also bundled their Video Effect with this model, mostly this is a set of toys but one which will keep kids young and old amused for a few hours. You can select a number of animated characters from a library who's faces will then be shown on messenger instead of yours. However all the facial movements of the character are mapped from your own as recognised by the camera. We found this needed good light in order to work well but it does work and can provide an amount of entertainment when you pop up on video chat as an alien!

The Quickcam 5000 hooks up using USB 2.0 but is fully backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and it comes with a good 6 foot long cable which makes life easier with more tricky PC placements. The whole £35 bundle is backed up by a 2 year warranty although we doubt you'd need to call on it as this is a rounded and robust product.

Published - 20/07/2006

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