What is the best Webcam ?
Checkout what to look for in our Webcam Reviews

Looking for the best Webcam ?

How many of these things on the market are there ?

Maybe the correct question should have been how many decent webcams are there on the market ?

Beyond all the gumph and technical babble, its pretty straight forward when looking for the best webcam for your needs.

Firstly you need to consider what its going to be used for, i.e. just chatting to friends or relatives a decent low end camera will suffice, if you are looking to send higher resolution images, then be prepared to spend a little more.

Some software & ISPs give away a free web cam, but how good are they ?
Web cams these days range from a few to the higher end best webcam costing hundreds of dollars.

The first thing to look into is the resolution, most webcams have a resolution of 640x480 pixels, this is also known as VGA, but if you want one to give a better quality picture some have a resolution of more than twice that, but of course the higher the resolution the higher the cost.
 

Other Points
Webcams can also take still images, dont confuse the still image resolution with the video image resolution, generally the still resolution will be higher.

You may purchase a webcam thinking that you have a video resolution of 1.3 mega pixels, but this may be the photo resolution, so double check this. A decent webcam might be able to take still photos at more than 4 mega pixels.

The next point to consider is the FPS or Frames per second, the higher the frame rate the less glitchy the image will be.

Having a slow frame rate means people will look as if they are robot dancing, which can be very annoying, go for a camera with the fastest FPS you can afford, a fast webcam can always run slower if there is a slow internet connection, but a slow camera will always be slow.

Many webcams have built in audio capabilities; the microphone makes a big difference, having a cheap webcam with a cheap microphone could me a lot of re-verb, this can vary from a small degree up to making a voice call impossible.

If you purchase a cheap webcam and have this symptom either return the webcam and upgrade it, or alternatively purchase a stand alone microphone, these are very cheap, costing only a few bucks.

The size of the webcam be also play a big part, remember if you have a laptop and will be using the webcam on the road, you will probably want one of the smaller types.

Special webcams
There are a few webcams around now that are wireless, this makes them ideal if you dont want wires or maybe you want one setup in babies room to keep an eye on him/her.

I have even known people to have them watching over the front yard, they can then keep an eye on everything from virtually anywhere in the world, they are not cheap, but are in fact very reasonably priced.

One of the most overlooked things when purchasing a webcam is the type of internet connection you will be using it with.

Having a decent webcam with a slow internet connection will make the webcam unusable, so you may as well just purchase a cheap one as you will only be able to use a low resolution in any case.

An internet connection needs to realistically be  512k minimum when using any video and audio together.

Dont forget to close any other applications that may be using your internet bandwidth while using your webcam; many applications can be extreme internet bandwidth hogs.

Got a webcam problem - Read more on basic and general troubleshooting

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