On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Ron Crummett wrote: > It also seems strange to me that there is such a price gap in the camera > cost - you can buy a simple webcam with a $150 ceiling, and you can buy > the PTZ cameras with a floor near $900. Surely there has to be > something inbetween?
The USB webcams compress the video before sending it across USB. I think you get better quality from an NTSC camera and a frame grabber. I have a little 1/4" CCD camera from Digi-Key (can't find it in their latest catalog though) which is OK, and some no-name things for $50 which seemed a bargain but are no good in low light (i.e. what's good for projectors in quiet mode). A consumer grade camcorder would probably give better quality than a Webcam, plus have optical zoom and autofocus, for much less than $900. Controlling them from software is probably a pain, though Sony used to do a serial interface of some kind and there was some information on the Web, and no doubt IR could be made to work. There are also some standalone pan/tilt units available. We used to use a camcorder as a document camera, which I thought worked really well but some of the users couldn't seem to figure out the controls... -- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376 secur...@triumf.ca
