Creative Live! Cam Voice

Creative’s exclamation mark naming returns in a webcam that really doesn’t deserve it.

Creative’s Live! branding has returned, and in this case it applies to the above-average microphones and audio filtering technology that have been coupled to the new Live! Cam Voice webcam. Although having above average audio embedded into a webcam is convenient, and the picture the camera takes is acceptable, the camera’s still a lemon.

The base is comprised of a small, spring loaded hook system that latches on to your monitor. This is where its problems begin: it only opens to about five centimetres, so it won’t be able to clamp itself to every monitor available. It attached to only one out of four monitors in our labs, but should work with all laptop displays, unless they’re too flimsy to support it.

There are two options available to you if your monitor is too deep to support the webcam’s clip mechanism: balance it precariously on the top of your monitor or sit it on your desk and tilt it upwards enough to frame yourself from a low angle. Be aware that this will make you look out of place during a videoconference.

There is a single button on the top of the camera which launches the capture software. Here you can chose between still or video capture, time lapse, motion detection and remote monitoring modes. These modes will let you set up email alerts and automatic uploading of images to an FTP server.

The twin built-in microphones pick up directional speech effectively, and although the noise reduction modes do work in noisy environments, they muffle the sound, doing more damage than good. On the flip side, the inbuilt microphone means that there’s less to configure. A small boom microphone headset that terminates in 3.5mm plugs which connects to your soundcard is included in the package.

The camera lens is very wide, and verges on being a fish-eye lens. Because of this the edges of the image curve noticeably. You can reduce this in software quite effectively, and apply a host of gimmicky filters while you’re at it.

The camera uses a 1.3 megapixel sensor, and through software interpolation is capable of taking 5 megapixel stills. This doesn’t mean high quality snapshots though: they still have a distinctively grainy and pixelated webcam look to them.

The software is split into two main parts: the camera functions and the camera setup. The camera setup provides you with exposure, white balance and colour controls should you need them. The automatic settings work well, and adjust quickly to changes in lighting, which is good -- because using the manual settings caused the software to crash on us quite often.

Not only did it crash on us, the software re-defined the term system resource hog as we knew it. Using the camera through the included software flatlined a lowly Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM, and after adding effects we started to feel programs lining up in a queue, waiting patiently for free processing cycles. However we had no such problems when running Skype.

Although the Live Cam voice can produce some good images, the software and clip design simply let it down. Stylish as it may be, we simply can’t recommend it.