Gadgets & Gizmos

Trying to find a great HD webcam, but don’t like to spend a lot of cash? The $39.95 Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 tries to provide a great deal of the same high-definition goodness as the LifeCam Studio ($99, 4 stars), but at less than half the price. For the basics, the HD-3000 works, though in case your laptop already have one built-in, this webcam isn’t a reasonable upgrade.
To start using it, you will need Windows 7, Vista, or XP (with Service Pack 2), and at least a dual-core Intel PC running at 1.6GHz or higher. 720p video requires a 3GHz dual-core Intel PC and 2GB of RAM. As with all of Microsoft webcams, the HD-3000 combines with Windows Live apps; the installer asks you to install Windows Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker. For this review, I stuck with the included Microsoft LifeCam software. For video calling, the HD-3000 works with Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Skype, you will only getting VGA resolution (640-by-480-pixel) all over video calls, however.
The included LifeCam apps is easy to work with. A slide-out holder on the right has a bunch of live video effects and many of configurable settings. The 3D effects are cute, but ultimately worthless; in my exams, switching any of them on triggered a several-second lag between my action and the video response, despite my test system’s Intel Core i7 PC’s high-end AMD Radeon HD 5870 video card. The Configuration settings page is very useful: Here you can easily adjust brightness, photo as well as camcorder resolution, microphone volume, image flicker, and digital zoom adjustments (such as most webcams, there’s no optical zoom). There are application pan and tilt controls, but because there are no actual motors on the HD-3000, the settings only work if you have already zoomed in digitally.You will be able to record 16:9 widescreen video in 720p for up to 30 frames per second and also share it via Messenger, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Regarding audio, the Lifecam provides a built-in, uni-directional noise-canceling microphone. An examination video clip recording confirmed that the noise suppression fails to work properly; an office fan was heard clearly on the background during the whole recording. And also, the audio was a bit distorted at the default configurations, even though I do not speak out very loudly and kept about two feet away from the microphone. Switching down input obtain helped with the noise issues.