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Best Webcam on a Budget for Linux?
Garak asks: "Webcams seem to be hit and miss for a combination of image quality, light sensitivity and price. Lately I've been mostly missing looking for a webcam to use on my mobile telerobot that I'm building for my thesis project. I require a webcam that will produce an acceptable picture under normal office lighting without breaking my shoe string budget. So Slashdot, what is the best value in a low cost, Linux compatible webcam?"
I have used an old Logitech Quickcam (parallel port interface).
The quality isn't great, but it works.
Take an old BTTV-chipset based TV in card with composite in (wintvgo comes to mind - ebay or craigslist it) and hook it up to a real camera.
While the two of these may seem pricy - the truth is the card is cheap and non-USB cameras are abundant and cheap because you dont HAVE to get a camera 'designed' to work with your pc and therefore price-inflated. You can use an old camcorder or even a security camera. Either can be found around for alot less than you think. Additionally, The image quality on these real CCD based cameras far exceeds that of most USB devices and the PCI card means you get close to 800 lines of horizontal resolution in at very little processor cost.
I do the same thing here and it cost me $25 (had the pci card, bought an old videoconferencing camera on ebay).
I bought a Logitech QuickCam Zoom, which has worked perfectly with the Philips chipset driver available here. Unfortunately, due to political differences between the Kernel developers and the developer of this module (who provided a source provided low-quality driver, and a binary only higher-quality driver), the module is no longer actively maintained. :-( This was already covered here on Slashdot.
I remember an article from a few years (?) back that showed a robot that could play tetris - not an automatic tetris player, but a robot that used a camera to look at the screen, attempt to match the falling shape to memory, and play according to what it thought was falling. I can't find the link on google (too many locations trying to get me to download tetris), but if someone with more time on their hands had a look I bet you could find the camera they were using. It'd have to be fast enough to detect the piece before it reached the bottom, and good enough quality to recognise what shape the piece was and in which orientation it was, and act appropriately.
OTOH, the project seems slightly frivolous, so the cost may have been slightly more than shoestring.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
My experience has been that the cheap cameras can vary wildly, even when the model number stays the same. So, if you look online and discover that somebody managed to get their VizoPro 5000QX-5 (or whatever) working with Linux, even if you go to the store and pick up your own, it may not work because the other guy had a different revision (that's probably not listed either on the box or the camera).
The way I see it, there are two ways to handle this:
Budget: go to a store with a liberal return policy and buy a cheap webcam. Take it home and try it. If it doesn't work, return it and get another one. Repeat until successful or out of cameras.
Lazy: buy an iSight or some other firewire camera. They cost a bit more, but firewire video is basically "driverless", so it's pretty much guaranteed to work.
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I use a four year old Intel Create and Share USB webcam with GnomeMeeting. Decent enough picture with average light.
Why not go used? Looks like there's plenty on Ebay.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
It would help if you more accurately described what your "low budget" is, but anyway:
I was able to pick up an Orange Micro iBot, a Firewire Webcam, from eBay for about $40. It delivers great quality, but the colors are a bit wonky (looks fine in black and white). This might be due to the lighting in my room, though, so who knows, YMMV.
Anyway, firewire is great, as other people have mentioned, especially for video. I get the 30 FPS rated by my camera without breaking a sweat, at full resolution. Compare this to the 2.5 FPS I get from my USB camera (Granted, USB 1.1). You might have to buy a firewire card, but this can be had off the internet for less than $20.
honestly, for a cheap webcam ($30!), the D-Link DSB-C310 is great. It's got an ov518+ chipset, which is supported by the kernel, all you need is the module from http://alpha.dyndns.org/, load ovcamchip and ov511 and you're rolling with xawtv or any other v4l application. Great price, not too ugly to look at, and decent quality video. I'd buy another one if I were to get a webcam again.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Quite a few webcams are based on various Sunplus bridge chips, which have excellent Linux support through the SPCA drivers. The driver author, Michel Xhaard, has a list of supported cameras along with a rough quality rating.
Bleh!
I'll throw in with the Firewire crowd. IIDC cams are the way to go for compatibility and performance. The IIDC device class is standardized so the same kernel module works with any Fireware cam.
As far as image quality, the best cam I've seen (for a reasonable price) is the Unibrain Fire-i. It works better in low-light situations than any other webcam I've tried.
I've posted a bit of general information on webcam hardware on my webpage, if you want an introduction to the different options you have under Linux. It's a bit dated but mostly still relevant.
Why aren't there hardware standards for webcams like there are for other USB devices? All USB still cameras support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). All joysticks support the USB Human Interface Device (HID). Why not webcams?
Yet another throw in vote for firewire cameras.
.5-1 sec delay to focus), if you need that.
One robot I built as part of a club used two firewire cameras. (full resolution from both at 30fps on a 400mb bus)
Unibrain has them on cheap (you will need a ND filter if used outside though)
Also, the apple iSight has autofocus (about
This
If you're planning on doing any computerized analysis of images, a cheap webcam might be worthless. Most vision algorithms look at the laplacian of the image in order to achieve lighting invariance. However, most webcams compress images in ways that completely trash the laplacian, but aren't very noticeable to the human eye. D-CAM is an uncompressed standard for digital cameras, and is perfect for machine vision applications. We've used Point Grey Dragonfly cameras with great success.
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I have one of these that I got for about $80. It's not really designed for mobile use but it gives a decent picture and is a stand alone web enabled device that does still images and streaming. It works both wireless (802.11b) and wired via ethernet. I like it and the price was right. I just wish they would make an outdoor version.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Axis http://axis.com/products/video/camera/index.htm has a nice line of network cameras that themselves run linux and a webserver to provide the picture. May be too spendy, tho'.
Mmm, donuts.
Field of view would be easy to conquer if you provide several simultaneous streams. That's the approach I'm investigating with stereo pairs of cameras for 3d view. The problem is that most camera makers don't follow the USB spec, so you can't plug in more than one of the same model at a time.
/. two weeks ago, someone could've done all this research for me. ;)
The exception to the rule is the Vista Imaging VICAM, which was originally made in a parallel port version, then bought by 3Com and released in a USB version as the 3Com HomeConnect Camera. It was then bought by Digi/IONetworks and released as the Watchport/V. In all of its USB incarnations, you can run several Vicams simultaneously.
According to the informative reviews I've read, Vista did a lot of things right with this camera. Despite being an old design, the image quality is still among the best you'll find. You can get accessory lens packs, to change the field of view.
Other cameras that support multiple instances are the Logitech QuickCam 4000 and the ADStech "Turbo USB 2.0 webcam". There may be more.
Now, if only I'd thought to do an Ask
Beware of Logitech Quickcam Express. The old ones seem to have good Linux support, but they are now using a new detector (ICM532), whose support is only in it's infancy under Linux. I bought one a couple of months ago and found this out the hard way !!
(My camera is 0x46d/0x920 and I have not got it to work properly yet, thought others have).
For low-cost low-light webcam performance, it's still difficult to beat the Philips Toucam Pro (aka Toucam 840). The electronics haven't changed for a few years, but I haven't found anything better in low light. See Lundycam for a comparison of a Toucam and a low-end Network camera at dusk.
Check out the Logitech QuickCam PRO 4000.
This is the cheapest USB camera with a
real CCD sensor. The image quality is
quite a bit better than the similarly priced
CMOS based cameras. They sell for about $80.