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?"

Comments

The cheapest webcam = not a webcam

[jgaynor]

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).

Re:The cheapest webcam = not a webcam

[jgaynor]

Ahhhh you're right - in that case it wouldn't work. I guess you're going to have to go with USB :(. If you're using an older laptop motherboard I don't think you're problem is going to be the video interface though, It will probably be the video processing.

What is the telerobot going to use the video for? Is it simply an interface to the remote controller (human or non-human) of the robot? If so you should think about using simple wireless video. 2.4Ghz wireless video is plentiful and cheap, even on battery (read: X10). On the remote end you can feed it into an analog screen or another, beefier machine with TV-in. If the video is going to be processed and acted upon BY the robot without remote assistance, you may want to look into getting stronger equipment onboard the robot or moving up to an ATX form factor power by battery.

So come on give us some more details! We promise we won't steal your thesis idea :)!

Re:The cheapest webcam = not a webcam

[Garak]

Part of the idea is that this robot can hop onto any 802.11b/g network from which it will connect to a webserver where one can login and operate the robot. The video is only for human eyes and no processing will be done besides compression.

My thesis is a object avoidance and navagation system for mobile telerobots. My theory is that the view from the camera is too narrow to nagivate from and that additional information is requried.

I've already spent by budget on sensors, electronic componts and mircontrollers. The webcam was supose to be the simple cheap off the self part.

I already had an old dell PII 400/w 256megs of ram laptop motherboard and 802.11b card kicking around. Its currently setup to boot from cd with a usb flash drive root so we can remove the cdrom to conserve power and space onboard the robot.

Re:Logitech QuickCam Zoom

[drnlm]

Luc Saillard picked up the Phillips driver awhile ago now. See his PWC page for details.

iSight or gratuitous returns

[beegle]

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.

OV-511 chipset based cams

[Goeland86]

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.

Webcams

[crisco]

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.

Firewire or frame grabber, definitely

[lutchann]

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.

Re:Hardware standards

[lutchann]

See the link in my previous post. USB 1.1 has a maximum transfer rate of 12 Mbps which is much too low for any useful video streams, so when the USB spec was written nobody really thought it would be used for webcams at all. Unfortunately the ubiquity of USB made USB webcams inevitable, so here we are.

compression

[Homo Stannous]

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.

webcam? try network cam!

[Zekat]

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'.