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

[JVert]

Home depot has some color cameras with IR nightvision, the IR is a little strong for sitting on top of the monitor might blast your face with light, or maybe the monitor gives off enough light that the camera wont use the IR. The color balance isn't that good but I bet you can tune it in pretty close in the capture card. I picked this one up for $50. Just a real nice camera for low light conditions (most home computers).

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.

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.