The Quickcam Messenger has worked well for us for 2+ years!

Well over two years ago my wife and I upgraded to a broadband connection. This along with Instant Messaging applications finally made it realistic for us to buy a webcam and chat with grandparents, friends and family via video connections. At the time we were living in Nebraska while both of our families were living in Montana, so this would be a great way to keep the kids visually attached to their family members from so far away. Now we just needed a webcam…

Off to Best Buy…

At about the time we started searching for a webcam Best Buy had the Logitech Quickcam Messenger on sale. Normal price was $49 and through the sale we could also get a $15 mail-in-rebate. I knew from past experience with a keyboard-mouse combo that Logitech was a quality company, and the Quickcam Messenger looked like it would fit our needs, so we bought it.

What is the Quickcam Messenger, and what do I need to run it?

The Quickcam Messenger is a small ball-shaped camera/microphone combination that attaches via a 6’ USB cable to your PC. The camera itself is a round, plastic ball with the lens, a small hole where the microphone rests and a push-button for capturing still photos manually. The lens had a dial focus on it so you can focus the shot depending on the subject's distance from the camera. Simply twist the black housing around the lens until the subject is in focus. The camera portion will fit easily within your palm as it is only 2-3” in diameter. Other than that there is a base that comes with the camera which stabilizes the camera, a CD driver and user manual.

If you want to run this camera on your system, there are a few minimum requirements you will need to keep in mind. The list below should be enough to run the camera, as provided by Logitech:

Windows 98, 2000, ME or XP
Pentium II 400 or higher
64MB of RAM
200MB free hard drive space
USB port
CD-ROM drive
16-bit color display adapter
Windows compatible sound card and speakers (for audio component)

Setup/Install

Logitech has made this quite easy to set up, at least in my experience with Windows XP. Simply place the CD in the drive and plug in the camera. It should go through the setup automatically and find the proper drivers for the camera, load the software, etc. You are now ready to use your webcam!

What can I do with it?

While there are several uses that someone could dream up for a webcam, I will not detail them all here. Rather, I will relate to you how I have used it myself and you can project your own uses from there…

Obviously we have used this webcam as a communication tool with my parents, in-laws, friends and family. The camera has a video capture size of up to 640 X 480 which is not huge, but still usable. The camera will capture video at a frame rate of 30 FPS which is seamless to the human eye if achieved. In our experiences from one broadband connection to another we have seamless action with no noticeable lag. My sister on the other hand is on a dial-up connection and the picture is very jumpy, resulting in more of a slideshow effect than seamless video. The video is not going to be on par with a DV camera, that is for sure. However, if you are looking for something that gives you a quality video picture this camera will deliver. The audio from the microphone is very good, although you need to ensure that the individual application is set up to use the camera as the audio microphone! Make sure that the camera and your speakers are far enough away from each other to avoid interference. The microphone can be very sensitive, so play with the settings. If you can’t achieve a good setting without losing all sound, you may do what we did and place a piece of scotch tape over the mic to muffle the sound some.

One interesting note is that even though my father has broadband and a Quickcam Messenger, his video was very choppy with almost no audio. Turns out his Norton Internet Security was slowing the video to almost nothing. We are still not sure why it let anything through (or why my copy of NIS didn’t affect transmission), but an uninstall and reinstall of NIS fixed the problem as it configured the firewall to allow the camera to ‘communicate’ during initial setup.

For IM’ing one another we use MSN Messenger, but this camera will also work with AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Messenger, the previous version of MSN Messenger. In MSN Messenger the camera is easy to set up; simply go to the tools menu and select Audio/Video Tuning Wizard. Select Logitech Quickcam Messenger for capture device (if your PC has multiple capture devices), and **IMPORTANT** change the microphone setting from the default (which will be your audio card) to Camera. Once you see the moving image and can verify that the bars move when you speak into the microphone, you are good to go.

In Windows XP if you want to find your camera you can go to the Control Panel, select Printers and Other Hardware, Scanners and Cameras. From here you can select your Logitech Quickcam Messenger and capture still pictures using a software interface. We used this for a while prior to buying a ‘real’ digital camera to take pictures with. It was very handy to use for small stills (640 X 480 pixels) of the boys to send to those friends without broadband.

Recently I have been playing with a few video editing software applications and have taken captures of the video and audio from the camera to send as video emails. This works extremely well for sending cute little shorts of the boys, or to send a personal video-gram to someone who is currently offline…

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any tasks using the Logitech software. I personally believe that if you buy this camera you should add the drivers to the computer, and that is it. Logitech has included a ton of ‘extras’ in software, some of which seem alright on the exterior and others that hog massive resources for nothing… For instance, Logitech will add an Image Studio that is superfluous if you own any kind of image management software. There was also chat software by Logitech with my camera, but they have wisely chosen to kill it since that time. The VideoSnap program allows you to insert video into your EBay auctions, but why? I honestly couldn’t think of a reason for doing this. Finally, there is a system tray icon that will ‘monitor’ the Logitech website and look for more wonderful updates and additions to the software for your camera. It was quite annoying when it did pop up with information not related to updates, and it hogged valuable RAM so it got killed as well…

Overall

Overall, this is a very good camera with some decent specifications. 640 X 480 pixels is a good picture and 30FPS will give you seamless video over a broadband connection. Having the camera and the microphone in one package is convenient, and the microphone picks up sound well. One warning: don’t set your camera near your speakers or the feedback will overpower you and the receiver! The small size allows this camera to set easily on most anything, including my 17” LCD monitor. The 6’ cable should be long enough to work with most desk setups, and it now resides on top of our HTPC in the living room. I would recommend this camera to folks looking for a rugged, quality webcam for their personal use. When I paid $34 for this webcam after the rebate, this was a smoking deal. Now I would expect that this can be found for $25-35 fairly easily with no rebates. It is worth it.