More Uses Than You Might Expect!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent crisp image, clear audio, easy to install, stylish but very unobtrusive.

Cons: The manual focus is a huge problem that they have to fix.

The Bottom Line: 
Very adequate for personal use or in a variety of professional surveillance.

Author's Review
Detective Steve and I learned a long time ago that when you need to capture video and audio of a subject you are investigating, it is usually unwise to point a video camera or a cell phone at them, wave and say, "Say cheese."

Steve has had four digital cameras smacked out of his hands and I have been pursued by two guys that saw me taking video they didn't want public. Perhaps we are slow learners but we have stopped using any kind of technology that actually looks like we are recording anything.

The best way to be in a public place and record video and audio of your subjects is to use a laptop with a webcam. And I find the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe a very adequate choice on the market right now.

Stylish To A Fault

The fact is that as far as styling goes, this quick cam is sleek and beautiful. This might strike you as strange but I love the feel and even the smell of some technology when I remove it from its packaging. I was impressed with how lightweight this camera feels and yet its molding is sturdy. In my (part-time) business, I sometimes have to get up pretty fast to follow a subject. I've dropped this QuickCam to the tile more than once. The lens on a video camera is liable to crack after a good fall like that but this camera, because it is so light, takes abuse and continues to dish out crisp, clear video and audio.

But the problem with how stylish this camera looks is that it looks too much like a camera.

Yes... I know that there are hundreds of pieces of surveillance equipment out there now that are amazing. You can do anything you want if you want to spend the money! Steve's little detective outfit that I work for gets about five jobs a month and that's on a good month. He's a retired cop and I can only help him part-time anyway so we don't want to go putting a ton of money into this business. At about $60 bucks, the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe is a great buy!" And it works just as well as a surveillance camera for one reason:

People are used to seeing cameras all around them now.

Steve and I don't need to go dropping a grand on some of these pen sized little badboys that you can stick in your hat or wear as a ring on your finger. Trust me, these are out there at the "consumer level", you just need to know where to look. But they can cost a lot of money. Why spend hundreds of dollars when you don't need to?

Here's an example.

A woman named Sariah calls and tells us she has been going through her husband's credit card statements. Once every two weeks, on Fridays between 1:00 and 3:00 pm (half of detective work is done by just the fact that people are so darn predictable) her husband is spending about $13 to $15 bucks at a Starbucks in Provo.

This is suspicious to her for three reasons: 1. He shouldn't be anywhere near Provo on Fridays. 2. His religion prohibits him from drinking coffee and 3. Fifteen bucks means that he's buying for two.

She gives us a photo and I'm up there on Friday comparing faces to the photo. I follow him in and take the table next to the one he chooses. I set up the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe as he brings his drinks back to his table and takes no notice at all that I have a webcam trained, over my shoulder, in his general direction.

Resolution On This Camera Is Fantastic!

When his boyfriend shows up, neither of them notice the camera sitting there on top of the screen of my laptop. The resolution is so good that it actually catches the subtle (erotic?) gestures that they surreptitiously make with their fingers as their hands are almost touching on the surface of the table. Oh my word. Yes, it's bad news for Sariah.

Good News For Lovers Of Great Webcam Audio!

Totally startling to me was that while I couldn't hear their conversation amidst the bustle of this Starbucks, the camera mike not only picked it up but recorded it! We were able to run this audio through Audacity (excellent Open Source auido program) to enhance just the conversation that our subjects were having.

Storage! Another Huge Bonus

I know probably not everyone out there is going to be saving all their video straight to their hard drives but I have to say that this Webcam is much superior to any of the video cameras on the market right now because the storage is separate from it, which means that you can literally store as many hours of video as you wish to, depending on the size of your drive. This comes in handy if you are doing a lengthy surveillance of a residence and you want to capture the license plate numbers of every car that visits the residence over a 48 hour time period. You can point the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe at the residence and depending on your laptop battery supply backups, you can literally capture two days of comings and goings. It's a trivial matter then to just fast forward through all the time you would have wasted sitting there when nothing is happening. Detective work is getting cheaper and cheaper.

ADJUSTABLE CLIP

There will be times when you are setting your camera up when you don't want to attach it directly to your laptop. For instance you may need to hide the actual laptop under a bed and then conceal the camera by clipping it to an out of the way table leg. The adjustable clip makes this easy. You would be amazed by the things that people fail to notice in their environment.

CABLE LENGTH

Of course the cable length on this camera, being USB, is adjustable, so it is possible to have your laptop in another room while you secretly capture activity (if you bring the correct USB cable). It has sometimes been necessary for us to actually place the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe on the inside of a residence while the laptop is concealed outside of the residence. Steve and I are debating some blue tooth options that will soon take care of the wiring problems we have run into during these situations, but like I say, we don't want to invest the money at this point, so this camera really works great! The fact that I am a free man and able to write this review should be evidence enough that these operations have never been compromised at all.

This QuickCam Comes With Adequate Software

Listen, I know some people out there are probably raving about the fun applications that you can use with this quick cam. Yes, you can make collage and have a funny image appear over your face. So what. Video surveillance technology like this is not a toy and it is my personal opinion that they shouldn't be used as toys, regardless of the fun that people have with them. So me, personally, I think that these software add-on trivialize the importance of what is happening in our surveillance society. You might call me a hypocrite for making the occasional few dollars by secretly recording people but as my example pointed out: I often sit RIGHT NEXT TO THEM and they pay no attention to me at all.

Sometimes I pretend to be texting while I am actually grabbing video of everything you say and do. If you don't care enough to be aware of your environment, why should I care about your privacy? There are cameras pointing at you from intersections all over. Don't get angry with me for something that you've allowed the government to do all over. Please. Who is the hypocrite in this case?

Specifications for the Logitech QuickCam Personal Web Camera for Notebooks Deluxe

This camera requires a PC with: Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, Windows Vista, Pentium® P4 (or compatible) processor, 1.4 GHz, 128 MB RAM (the kind of work we do requires about a Gig of memory!), 200 MB available hard disk space, USB port (obviously, duh, CD-ROM drive

WHAT YOU GET!
(info direct from Logitech)
High-quality VGA (640 x 480) CMOS sensor, Video capture: Up to 640 x 480 pixels, Still image capture: 1.3 million pixels (with software enhancement, Frame rate: Up to 30 frames per second, Color depth: 24-bit true color, Activity LED (this can be EASILY taped over so that no one knows what you are up to!)

BIGGEST DRAWBACK

This camera offers a manual focus which means that if your subject moves, they go out of focus. The fact is that I am never actually looking at the capture as it is minimized on the screen so I never know if I have lost focus until after I am viewing the capture.

This is annoying but soon new technology will come out that will make spying on you even easier!

Three cheers for Logitec.