|
I
just returned from a trip to Berkeley; I had checked out AMUG's new
iSight cameras at the meeting last week, so I hooked up one to our family
G4/933 at home and brought one with me to use with my company PBG4/667.
At home we have DSL, and the hotel where I was staying had in-room high-speed
Internet access through an Ethernet drop (probably also DSL); one Mac
ran OS X 10.2.8, the other had 10.3.3. So it was a fairly ordinary setup
all around, nothing high-end, but everything still went pretty smoothly.
You can take screenshots during a video chat using the iChat application
(menu item, or command-option-S). You can also blow the image up to
full screen, which of course does not give you more resolution, just
chunkier pixellation (static parts of the image looked reasonably well
interpolated). The "picture in picture" view from your own
camera looks clearer than what your "buddy" gets at the other
end, which is about the same quality as your view of that person. (You
don't have to make funny faces if you aren't trying to get your baby
daughter to laugh.)
The picture with just my wife and daughter was taken at night, with
light from two overhead compact fluorescent bulbs (and my iChat image
blown up to full-screen size, so the computer monitor illuminated them
with my lamp-lit scene, not the blue OS X background as you can see
reflected in my glasses); it shows that the iSight does a pretty fine
job in low light. (I took the liberty of updating both iSights' firmware
to the most recent version, 1.0.2, which does a much better job with
color balance in low light than the previous version.) As you can see
from the picture with my wife, daughter, and sister-in-law, though,
the iSight is a bit happier with more light. The room (and my 1600-book
SF collection) was illuminated here by sunlight peeking through mostly
closed horizontal blinds; stripes of direct sunlight caused the baby's
left shoulder to be overexposed. AMUG might consider buying a couple
of $40 SightLights from Griffin, to travel with our iSights for better
illumination after dark...
|
|
With regard to video quality, we had pretty near full-motion framerates.
Moving portions of the scene, like my daughter's waving arms, tended
to pixellate; I also noticed the tradeoff of bandwidth between video,
audio, and file transfer (you can send files from the "Buddies"
menu, of all places), so that (for example) my wife was unable to hear
me when I was transferring these screenshots to her. On the other hand,
she was almost able to read my lips, which tells you something about
the framerate! The audio is fully duplexed, if your bandwidth can support
it; we noticed some cutouts when our daughter was especially wiggly...
However, there was a perceptible lag, as if we were communicating across
continents instead of only across half the state; of course, the baby
found the resulting echo to be quite entertaining!
Each iSight comes with three mounts: one stands on your desk or glues
to the top of your CRT monitor or eMac (or G3 iMac), one glues to the
back of your LCD monitor (or G4 iMac), and one hooks over the top of
the open screen of a PowerBook or iBook. This last one also can hook
over the top of an LCD monitor, so I used it on the one we have at home.
We found angles to be awkward; you'll notice that my family in the screenshots
is at the bottom of the image , since the LCD monitor leans back a bit
and even with the iSight fully depressed in angle on its swivel, it
was pointed a bit too high. We figured it was better than a desktop-mounted
view up everybody's nose, though! The mounting on my PowerBook was somewhat
better, but because the screen bezel is so narrow (not like my old PowerBook
G3 WallStreet, which had a 12" screen built into a lid designed
to take a 14" at the high end) the edge of the slot that fits over
the lip of the lid was actually in contact with the screen itself, with
the weight of the iSight levering it down onto it. I tried mounting
the holder the other way around, which placed the center of the iSight's
mass behind the screen, but then I found that, as with our home setup,
this caused the iSight to aim too high unless I tilted the 'Book's lid
way down. I'll need to do a bit more experimentation with this next
time.
All in all, we found this to be a great way to stay in touch; little
Lura had still not quite figured out how Mommy squeezed Daddy into her
itty bitty cell-phone, but she seemed to grasp the idea of playing peek-a-boo
around the borders of the iChat window! If you travel with an OS X 'Book,
and stay in a hotel that has high-speed Internet access, I'd urge you
to take advantage of AMUG's newest acquisitions.
Return
to AMUG
|
