Date: Fri, 05 Jun 1998 06:59:12 -0400 From: Daniel McRobb <dwm@caida.org> To: Michael Gratton <mike@vee.net> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: reccomendations for a video camera Message-ID: <199806051059.FAA08849@arthur.caida.org> In-Reply-To: Message from <mike@vee.net> of Fri Jun 5, 1998 18:22 %2B0930 <XFMail.980605182239.mike@vee.net>
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> > Hi people, > > What's a good PC camera to buy (black & white or color)? What software is > available out there? > > I want be able to capture both individual frames and full motion video. > > Thanks.. > Mike. I think that depends on at least 2 things: - how much money you want to spend - intended use I shopped not too long ago and there seemed to be roughly a 3-tier price range for stationary CCD cameras which can't work standalone: $200 and under, around $500, and around $1000 (and more). The $200 and under cameras I found were either Connectix or Connectix-like (parallel port, horrible interrupt load) or USB (unsupported AFAIK). The $1000+ cameras have it all, some including motorized speaker-following technology of various types (good for video lectures). I wound up with one in the $500 range, a Sony CCD-PC1. Works well for me (though I'm not using the cheesy ceramic microphone in the base). Plugs in to a Wincast/TV card (fairly standard fare for FreeBSD). Intended use largely boils down to whether or not you want to be able to use the camera for other things (or alternatively, whether or not you want to use a camera whose intended use is not desktop computer oriented). A plain old videocamera works fine for motion video and usually has both RCA and s-video out jacks plus audio. You can use it away from your computer, obviously (but if it's always going to be on your desk, do you really want it sitting out all the time collecting dust on all those moving parts?). Software takes care of snapshots for you (fxtv, for example). I didn't look into handheld CCD snapshot cameras that also do motion video since my interest was strictly desktop videoconferencing and shots/movies of my crazy golden retriever in the home office. :-) Daniel ~~~~~~ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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