The highlights of the Ultra Vision were glass lens elements, a 1.3 megapixel sensor, and Rightlight and RightSound – light optimisation, and noise cancelling technologies. Logitech has a huge range of PC peripherals and has long been a champion of the webcam, and we’ve seen some excellent examples from it such as the Quickcam Ultra Vision. However, many laptops and virtually all monitors don’t have one so an external one it needs to be. Now if you’ve got a laptop, there’s a chance that you’ll have a webcam built in, which is certainly preferable in terms of convenience and absence of cable clutter. There are now also a variety of free video services to choose from, such as Windows Live Messenger, Skype, Yahoo and AOL – which is a lot better than it used to be when you just had Netmeeting, buried somewhere in Windows 98. Having experienced poor quality, stuttering images in the past, many people have dismissed the whole concept, but since PCs and the broadband connections have got faster, and since webcams are now pretty decent too, video conferencing or webcaming, a word I have just made up, is now pretty great.
It’s not something that you might have noticed but webcams are an area of technology that have collectively really improved over the past few years.