Creative Labs Video Blaster WebCam 3

I bought the unit almost 4 months ago, brought it home, plugged it in and soon had video on my screen. I began to play with the different settings, resolutions and color depths. About ten minutes later, however, the frame rate began to steadily decrease and eventually the green LED on the camera blinked off and I no longer received any video from the device. Rebooting had no effect and I had to uninstall and reinstall the drivers completely to get any image again. Ten minutes after that I experienced the same problem. I downloaded the latest drives, applied those, no fix. I call tech support and they suggested that it might be a power problem. I bought a powered USB hub and still had the same problem. I called again and found out that my USB port was sharing an IRQ and that this could cause problems with the camera. After tinkering around with my system, buying a USB adapter for my Palm cradle to free up the IRQ the serial port was taking up and removing some seldom used cards from my system, I tried agian. The USB port had it's own IRQ but I still had the problem. New drivers had come out by this time and I tried those. No help. I called tech support again. They suggested that I make sure that my system is not going in to power saving mode (it wasn't). Then they suggested that I might have a virus that was eating up my resources and slowing the camera down. I didn't think that I did but I scanned my computer anyway with the latest definitions. No viruses. Finally I got fed up and borrowed a 3com HomeConnect camera from a friend. It works beautifully. I can use Netmeeting to videoconfrence with my brother and I have had no strange problems with it. The picture is not quite as good and the frame rate is slower than the Webcam 3 (when it works) but one can't complain since the webcam doesn't work long enough to be useful. Now I have to find someone to sell the camera to so I can go buy something else.

Nice picture, decent software package, not too expensive.

Can't get it to work.

3com Home Connect

Friendly but not helpful in resolving my issue.

I purchased a webcam 3 about a month ago and have used it for web meeting and stop start animation. The camera is very affordable and offers a lot for such a low price. The resolution isn't great, but good enough for most of my needs. The biggest drawback with the picture color and the light response. If creative labs could better these features for even a slight price increase and think they may have one of the most popular webcams for the average computer user. Overall this webcam was a good purchase and well worth the money

Low cost easy to use small size

color light response

Fuji Digital Camera - cheapest model

Not worth mentioning in South Africa