OUR COMPUTER CAMERA PIX

Imaging isn't always black and white. Neither are computer cameras -- devices that capture live and still images directly into a computer. They're a quick, relatively easy way to fill your documents with pictures of the colorful characters in your office.

Unlike digital cameras, which store images in their memory, computer cameras connect to PCs and take movies or pictures of anything in the lens's range. They become the computer's eyeball, tethered to the back of the machine by an "optic nerve."

Digital images appear

instantly on your monitor. The cameras are great for videoconferencing. They're fairly inexpensive ($200 range) and can add hours of fun -- or headaches -- to a computer system.

We put Connectix's (San Mateo, CA 415-571-5100) Color QuickCam ($230) and StarDot's (Brea, CA 714-528-9719) WinCam.One ($200) to the test. We installed both cameras on a 486 PC with 16 MB of RAM, a 440 MB hard disk and a Stealth DRAM graphics card. We viewed the images on a 14" color monitor at 640 x 480 resolution. Then we installed the QuickCam on a PowerMac 7100/66AV with 24 MB of RAM and a SuperMac 20" color monitor with a Thunder 24 card. QuickCam works with the Macintosh. WinCam.One doesn't.

The WinCam.One runs on Windows 3.1 and 95. It requires a 386 or better PC with 4 megs of RAM and a 256-color video card. QuickCam works best on a 486/66 or better PC with 8 megs of RAM for Windows 3.1 (12 MB for Windows 95).

The software doesn't take up much space, but storing moving images does. You need 2 megs for the app and 1-2 megs for each 10 seconds of video (minimum 5 MB for movies). Still photos seem tiny by comparison -- 150 Kbytes for each 24-bit color photo.

Both cameras were a cinch to install. The QuickCam went in quicker than the WinCam -- it plugs straight into the keyboard and printer ports. The package includes a plug that lets the QuickCam and the keyboard work together.

On the downside, you DO lose your printer port. We would like to see a passthrough for the printer as well as the keyboard. You install the WinCam.One through a serial port and plug an adapter into the wall. We hated that it tied up the last COM port, so we lost access to the Internet. Web withdrawal.

Bizarre Things Along The Way....

During testing on the PC, the cameras had opposite problems. The WinCam.One took wonderful pictures but wouldn't record movies. The QuickCam recorded great movies but wouldn't take a picture. On the Mac, the QuickCam recorded movies and took pictures.

WinCam.One previews the picture or movie in black and white. It claims manual focus, but we had trouble putting the large pixels into focus. A plus is the way the camera adjusts to light. Color-filtering postprocessing buttons let you pick the best light for your environment (e.g. fluorescent, daylight, halogen).

The color photo displays gradually from top to bottom, like a JPEG file. But the outcome is like a cross between Almond Joy and a fortune cookie -- sometimes you get a good one and want to keep it, sometimes you don't.

The QuickCam lets you focus in full color, so you can work with the image before committing it to disk. But it can't help you control the lighting. You have to adjust the lighting around you. This can degrade your picture quality. One reason the Mac had far better image quality was we had more control over the lighting and could adjust it appropriately.

WinCam.One has a few nice features. White balancing lets you balance the color temperature with the exposure. Double scan lets you take double exposures of the same picture. Just be careful the model doesn't move during the second exposure.

The QuickCam also has some unique talents. Set up QuickCam to be a screen saver. When you're not using your computer, it shows everything in the lens's view. This was a lot of fun. We set it up as a security camera to see everyone that came into the office. Perch one on a

cubicle wall and spy on your coworkers. Very Orwellian. Just the kind of tool Dilbert's boss would enjoy.

The camera's time-exposure feature promises an easy way to take a picture of yourself. But when we used it, the picture came out blank. Apparently, there was too much light for the picture in our daylight conditions. It probably works best at night or in low light.

Saving Graces

Both cameras let you save your pictures in 640 x 480 res at 72 dpi using 16 million colors. A picture taken with the WinCam.One on the PC took up 900 KB. One taken with the QuickCam on the Mac occupied 1.18 MB for a TIFF image and 408 KB for a JPEG, 859 KB for a PICT. The movie we made using the QuickCam took 1.14 MB. It used very small captures. So what seemed like a long recording time played back very quickly in small captures.

A big difference between the cameras surfaced in the saving mode. WinCam.One has more options. It comes with Paint Shop Pro shareware. (If you like it, buy the full program.) Save pictures as raw images. Save them as bitmaps to use in multimedia apps. Manipulate them with the shareware or with your own program.

The QuickCam has a few downfalls in this area. It lets you save pictures in bitmap, TIFF or JPEG formats. The drawback: If you don't have your own image editing app, you can't manipulate the pictures. But you can open JPEG files in Netscape or JPEG view (downloadable from the Web). If you save images in the native QuickCam app, you can't view them after you disconnect the camera.

WinCam.One, lets you open up the pictures when the camera isn't plugged in to the PC. When the camera is plugged in and you launch the app, you can't open any files until you take a picture. More bizarreness.

Overall, the QuickCam's size and eyeball shape give it flexibility and mobility, but the unit caused the PC to crash a lot. It was temperamental. Some days it just didn't want to work. (Know the feeling?) On the Mac, it worked 100% better, but that's also due to the machine we used. Taking pictures with the WinCam.One felt like flying blind. But it does have decent picture quality and is pretty reliable.