Date: February 14, 2007 - Author: Rob Williams
If you frequently use a webcam and are looking for the best one available, I don't think there will be many other choices than the Ultra Vision. It's equipped with a large lens, comprised of five glass elements for the best image quality possible. When taking everything into consideration though, is it worth your $120?
One of the best parts about being a technology writer is being able to see cutting edge products as they are released. We at Techgage receive a healthy supply of these new "toys" such as cases, gpus, memory, cpus, etcetera. But, there's one market up until now we've never, ever covered. That market, being webcams. No, it's not too often that I pay attention to webcams and can't even recall the last time I've sat in front of one.
At last months CES, we stopped by the Logitech booth and two webcams caught my attention. Yes, I was surprised at this also. Regardless, we were informed about their latest Ultra Vision webcam that might very well be "next-gen" as far as this market goes. Everything about it screams high-quality, but we will get into that shortly. We were also shown the QuickCam for Notebooks Pro, which includes its own healthy feature set. We will be taking a look at that webcam by itself in the weeks to come, as I ran into a few problems with my first copy.
Whereas their Notebooks Pro webcam is designed for portability, the Ultra Vision is geared to be the cream of the crop. According to press materials, this webcam has unsurpassed image quality and has the best lens available. Physically, it's the largest webcam I've come across. This is thanks to the big f/1.6 lens that is comprised of five glass elements. The Ultra Vision also includes the RightLight and RightSound features for less echo and better overall lighting.
Despite being a top-end webcam, there is still only a 1.3 Megapixel sensor at your disposal. Will we ever see better resolution from a webcam? It's starting to seem unlikely, but its probably for the best unless you want to pay upwards of $200. Aside from that fact, video higher than 640*480 can be quite laggy via chat. That's more of a bandwidth problem than a webcam one, though.
First we can take a look at the packaging for both cameras. As I mentioned, the Notebooks Pro webcam had issues with it so I was unable to include it in this review.
Nothing extra is included with this model, except the software.
On each end of this cylindrical cam is a button used for a different purpose. One is to snap a quick photo while the other is a quick video preview, so you can make sure the lighting is appropriate, before going live.
On the front you will see the huge lens, microphone (center) and the Logitech logo. The ring around this logo lights up blue during use.
Finally, here is the Ultra Vision on my monitor. In the second image, you can see just how it manages to hold itself there. It's a heavy, sturdy webcam, so it should stay wherever you place it just fine.
Now that you've finished ogling the webcam, let's check out how the installation process went.
The manual explicitly tells you that you should install the software prior to plugging the webcam in, so for once, I listened. The first screen you will see is a standard welcome screen with "download latest installer" checked by default. Though this is a new webcam, there was already newer software for the taking, which downloaded in less than a minute.
The remainder of the installation is straight forward, with the "Logitech Messenger" feature also being checked by default. The entire process took around 4 minutes, which includes downloading of the latest installer.
Once the installation is finished, you will need to calibrate your microphone and volume dials.
That's it! Couldn't be simpler, really.
Once the install is finished, you get something like this on your screen. Minus the ugly mug, of course.
One thing I noticed right away was the fact that I could barely see my face. Where does this RightLight come in? Ahh, here we are.
The odd thing is here, is that the RightLight was on auto by default, but seemed to have done nothing. You can see in the picture above that I shifted the Spot Metering over a smidgen, which helped brighten up the frame a little. We have a nice HDR-like effect going on here as well.
Avatars was an aspect I wanted to play with right away though. It's the same feature I saw at CES that impressed me a -lot-. Basically, if you are having a bad hair day, had too many cupcakes, look like a real computer geek, are on the run or simply want to have fun, you can change your avatar to something more enlightening. Like an alien for example.
Before this feature will work properly though, you will need to calibrate your face to the camera. The instructions are easy to follow and you will wind up with a result like this:
Other default characters include a dinosaur and... pencil drawn figure dude.
While the QuickCam software only installs five of these avatars, there are over a hundred more at your disposal on their website. While at CES, Logitech told us that they would be regularly uploading new avatars each month.
Another clever feature is the ability to use a privacy shade. Simply put, it loads a graphic overtop of the webcam driver, so people on the other end cannot see you... just the image. This is a perfect solution for web voyeurs, when the only thing hardcore is their craving for privacy.
Up to this point, I haven't really given my thoughts on the performance/image quality/video quality, so allow me to do that now. First... the performance. It's good... the best I've seen up to now. No, I haven't been a huge member of the webcam club in recent years, but the Ultra Vision impressed me. While I will -never- be satisfied with the image quality from a webcam, there's no doubt that this one is really the cream of the crop.
Live video chat is supported up to 640*480 while images can be snapped all the way up into the 4 Megapixel range. However, -anything- over 1.3 Megapixels is falsely enlarged and looks absolutely horrid. Imagine a point-and-shoot camera that supports 10MP images. There's no way the 10MP images represent the same quality of a D-SLR. The same applies here. So, for fun photographs, this is a great solution, but don't rely on it for the best color representation or crispest images available.
As I mentioned, 640*480 is the maximum supported via live chat, which makes sense since these videos rack up in the megabytes quick. However, for personal videos that you can later send to friends, the camera supports up to 960x720 which had quite the impressive result. I expected a very laggy experience, but that wasn't the case. At its peak, it records around 15 frames per second, so really you will not notice lag unless you are moving -real- fast. Waving, doing jumping jacks or other similar activities will not result in much of a blur. The downside though is that these videos get big rather quick, an average of 250KB per second. So, recording a 30s video would result in a 7.5MB file, or 15MB for an entire minute. Still, in this day of broadband, this is not such a big deal. You won't want to be creating 10 minute long videos that often though. Or do you, you sly dog?
When it's all said and done, I am impressed with the Ultra Vision overall and believe its quality is top notch. I still don't believe it's worth the current $120 going price, however. If you want the fastest performance and best image quality, then this is a great product and is likely worth that cash. It really depends on how often you use your webcam, or rely on it in general. If you are constantly in online meetings, it may be a worthwhile investment. I assure you, if webcams are important to you, this one will not let you down. The average Joe may want to stick to a $50 Logitech model at a brick and mortar store if quality and performance are not a high priority. If you are still unsure whether the Ultra Vision is for you, review my pros and cons closely :-)
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