Creative Live! Cam Optia USB Webcam Review

The Optia mounted onto the MacBook

The Optia's mount is equally superb, and is actually the best mount we've seen so far for a desktop webcam. Working in unison with the hooked front, a spring loaded hinge clip folds out for clasping onto flat panel displays of varying thicknesses that even suits the petite form factor of a laptop's LCD. Rubber strips will keep the webcam from sliding, although don't expect the Optia to stay in place mounted upside down - the spring's not strong enough for that. The hinge of the mount also has a rubber strip of it's own for placement on flat surfaces when the clip isn't extended, such as on top of a CRT or desk.

The actual camera potion of the Live! Cam Optia is also a treat, featuring a full 270° vertical swivel that allows you to capture both what's going on at your end and what's happening behind your monitor, while a 15° horizontal swivel allows you to center in on your offset seating arrangement. A blue ring lights up at the ball joint of the Optia when its in use, and as an additional measure of privacy the camera will completely black out the video when swiveled down.

The only external design flaw I can really criticize is the lack of a built-in microphone. Creative supplied a bundled earbud set with an in-line microphone, but this solution is about as convenient as it is attractive. When practically every webcam these days has a microphone, I can only speculate that Creative chose not to implement one in the Optia in order to persuade buyers to purchase the more expensive Live! Cam Voice. Whatever the actual reason is, this is a major con in my book. Expect to pay another $12-40 for a stand microphone, either USB or Analog.

USB Video Class
Originally released in 2003 by the USB Implementers Forum, USB Video Class (UVC for short) is a spec that's been slowly making its way into webcams, actually appearing under our noses with our two latest webcam reviews. In a nutshell, if a webcam is UVC compatible, it can be used by any operating system that supports UVC, even if no drivers from the manufacturer are installed. The reason companies are finally breaking free of their proprietary protocols and switching to UVC is a matter of marketing - they need to in order to qualify for the Windows Vista Logo Program.

So far Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Mac OS X 10.4.3+, and Linux with the Linux-UVC driver all support the standard, although there are still a few technical difficulties with the underdog operating systems as everything is still immature at this point. In OS X for example, while the video is indeed working as shown through Video Viewer and iChat in OS X 10.4.9, not all programs initialize the Live! Cam Optia properly, leaving it incompatible (for now) with Skype, Quicktime, and Yahoo Messenger. Other UVC cameras such as Microsoft's LifeCam NX-6000 will work in Video Viewer, but not in Skype or iChat.

On the Windows side of things you're better off installing Creative's own drivers, as you'll be able to adjust brightness and exposure on the fly among other things, and support for Windows 2000 and XP sans Service Pack 2 is enabled. Still, it's nice that UVC is making its rounds because as time passes we'll only see better support for these cameras, all the while providing more options for consumers.

Slews of Software
As is typical with Creative's products, the Live! Cam Optia came loaded with a ton of software. Having worked in an IT shop where I've seen a wide array of computers hobbled down by bundleware the owners never end up using, I question Creative's decision to include so many programs, but on the other hand the software included this time actually fills a few niche markets and doesn't seem too far out of place. (At least they didn't load a swarm of Free AOL Trial programs scattered throughout my hard drive this time.) Thankfully you're provided the option to install only the components you want in the setup program.

The Essentials
First up is Creative's own software, the Live! Cam suite. This is actually broken down into several programs, which can feel a bit clumsy to users such as myself that prefer a unified interface. The closest thing to unification you'll see here is the Live! Cam Manager that lives in your system tray, providing quick access to your default video chat application, the Live! Cam Center, the Live! Cam Console, Creative's Photo Manager, and Windows Movie Maker. See where this is going? For those 5 little shortcuts, the Manager takes a whopping 434x419 of screen real estate and doesn't even have the courtesy to autohide, so it's best to just right click on the icon in the system tray for the same functions without the bloat.

For your basic webcam operations outside of video calling, there's the Live! Cam Center, allowing for still photo capture in both JPEG and BMP formats and video capture in either WMV or AVI (with your choice of installed codecs). Both of these can be captured in resolutions ranging from 160x120 to 640x480, and still photos can be blown up further to 1280x960 using interpolation (you'll lose quality).

Going beyond the scope of what many webcam manufacturers provide, Creative also includes the ability to monitor the video source for motion events, the threshold for which can be adjusted and masked within the program's settings. When an event is triggered, video can be captured for a set duration of time, an audible alarm may sound, and an email can be sent with a photo attachment of what the camera saw.

A basic webcam program is also included that can automatically generate a web page for viewing photos taken by your webcam at a set interval, along with the ability to automatically upload them to a web host through FTP. The web themes aren't anything spectacular and there are no advanced features like superimposing a watermark or text from a text file (useful for showing viewers what you're listening to), but when it comes to basics Creative has you covered. You can view a sample here. Last but not least is the time lapse record feature, which will take photos in a set interval and transform them into a WMV movie.

The Extras
The other major bits of Creative's Live! Cam suite are the Cam Console and Cam Doodling - the main reasons to install the drivers. The Cam Console appears any time your webcam is activated, allowing for typical adjustments to the picture on the fly, including exposure, brightness, color, and flips.

Face Tracking is also present in the Cam Console, although there isn't much to do here. You can enable it or disable it, define whether it's occasionally or constantly checking your head's position, adjust the zooming speed, and enable a picture-in-picture that shows the rest of the camera's view outside of your zoomed head. Unfortunately, there aren't any manual zoom or panning controls, nor are there options for tracking multiple heads. Even then, I find the face tracking to be very spotty, as even in decent lighting conditions it will do one of three things: remain dormant, zoom too close and crop off the top of my head, or center to the side, on my ear.

One webcam first I'm glad to see Creative implement is a Parental Control feature in the Live! Cam Optia's drivers, allowing parents to ensure their kids aren't becoming camwhores by requiring a password every time the camera is initialized.

Special effects overlays also make an appearance to entertain the kids and annoy coworkers with, including overlays that track your face, background effects, movement effects, overlays, and video transformations. Unfortunately however, they're all mixed quality. Some have issues with cropping your face beyond belief, others will consume so much CPU time that recordings go out of sync, and the backdrop images simply don't work. There are a few decent ones in there like the Multiplex effect, but nothing overly great. Also, there's no thumbnail preview for the effects before applying them in a live conference, just a dropdown menu. See them all (as of 3-16-07) for yourself.

One of the newer add-ons to the Live Cam Optia is doodling, a fun way of adding your own video effects to the picture. You can draw lines that track your face, static lines that don't move, drippy lines, bubbles, flames, and falling glitter. My only complaints with this one are the lack of colors to choose from, and the lack of a shortcut to the program from the Live! Cam Manager.

What irks me about both the Doodling and VideoFX is that both will insert a video bug into the stream every time they're enabled. Is this really necessary? Good products advertise themselves, not through forced viral marketing.

Also Installed
These are the pieces of software I feel don't add significant value to Creative's software package, and at least in my eyes should not influence your view on whether or not to pick up this camera. I cover them only because they're installed by default, and as such should at least be mentioned.

Rounding off the Creative branded software is the Creative Photo Manager and Creative Photo Calendar programs. These are both tack-ons at best. Photo Manager's only connection to the Live! Cam Optia! is the fact that it was installed at the same time and has a shortcut in the Live! Cam Manager. Beyond that it's yet another Photo Organizer, with better alternatives out there for free from Adobe and Google. Photo Manager allows you to create albums, smart albums (based on criteria such as captions or creation dates), and perform minor touchups such as removing red eye. Why do I quickly pass it off? The interface is slow, there are no individual undos, and it doesn't offer any preset navigation links to the Live! Cam Center directory.

When it comes to Creative Photo Calendar, there's nothing really wrong with the program; it's relatively straightforward. Select a theme, add your photo for the month, insert a few events, and print it out. Not bad, but it'd be nice if there was even an option to take a quick snapshot from the camera. All images must be taken beforehand.

As far as non-Creative software goes, the first I'll go over is Orb. Personally I can't say I've heard of this company before, but apparently they've been around for a few years now. Essentially, Orb is a free streaming service that allows you to enjoy the music, photos, videos and TV shows that are on your home computer while at work, on your Sprint cell phone, or even on your Xbox 360 / Wii / Playstation 3. What's interesting about this is that it can even allow you to stream your webcam video, as well as monitor it with SMS notifications when there's movement. Don't expect to use it as a baby monitor though, there's about a 15 second delay. You don't have to be a Creative customer to use this, so if you want you can try it out right now.

Next up is SightSpeed 6.0, a subscription based video calling, instant messaging and VoIP solution for anyone with a network of friends that's actually willing to pay for that. I imagine most users will stick to the traditional Skype, Windows Live, Yahoo and AIM networks so I won't be going into this, it's already outside the scope of the review. PC Magazine has a review of the current version if you're interested though.

Finally there's muvee autoProducer 4. Interesting concept, but not nearly enough control for a polished video. Essentially you take a video clip or a few images, an MP3 and let the software mash it all up into one laughable (or plain hideous) video automatically. Additional styles of content mashing can be had online, for a price. It's interesting to see that Creative obviously paid for co-branding on this, yet decided to put a shortcut to Movie Maker, not autoProducer, in the Live! Cam Manager. With final "muvees" rivaling the quality of music video produced by a seventh grader, I can't say I blame them.

Video Quality
As mentioned before, the Live! Cam Optia is a budget webcam. As such, the CMOS sensor is very basic, offering only a 640x480 resolution that's on par with other budget webcams as well as those built into a few computers. For another $10, you can pick up a 1.3 megapixel camera that will provide a significantly improved picture quality, and typically a wider viewing angle as well.

Still, for a VGA sensor the Live! Cam Optia has a few things going for it, the most important being the manual ring focus that allows you to take shots of anything at any distance, including macro shots as you can see in the below picture of a few puzzle pieces.

Framerates are also a treat since the Optia utilizes Hi-Speed USB to maintain a full 30 frames per second at all resolutions by default. As far as lighting goes, the Live! Cam Optia does better than most VGA cameras in dim lighting and null-lighting. With only the glow of my laptop in front of me, the Optia can increase its exposure time (and drop framerates to 10fps) to keep my mugshot visible at distances of about 2.5 feet or less.

In low lighting, white balance is better preserved than most budget cameras that tend to tint the screen blue or red, although saturation will be artificially high. What's somewhat annoying however is the Optia's constant desire to tint the world around it yellow, something that persists even in average lighting after hue adjustments.

With the above average color balance and light sensitivity, it's unfortunate that the Live! Cam Optia is burdened by a flaw that affects all sessions taken at any resolution less than 640x480. This includes all Windows Live, Skype, Yahoo, and AIM sessions, as these are taken at 320x240 resolutions or less. What happens is that video is turned artificially blocky with overexaggerated contrast and color streaks.

You can get a glimpse of the problem by opening any video preview window in your favorite video calling application, then enabling face tracking in the Live! Cam Console. Voila! The camera quickly re-initializes as 640x480 while still outputting 320x240 video, only now the picture is sharp (and you have to contend with the erratic face tracking). This bug unfortunately is hardware related, so switching to UVC drivers won't help.

Recap
Creative left me with mixed, but mostly disappointed thoughts on the Live! Cam Optia. The Live! Cam Center, clever design, manual focus, decent low light performance and above average color balance all come into play to highlight the strengths of the Optia. What hurts it is the otherwise clumsy software package, occasional unsynchronized recordings, lack of a built-in microphone, and issues with all images captured at resolutions less than 640x480. While I wouldn't consider the Live! Cam Optia a bad webcam, I can't say I recommend it for the current street price of $70 unless you absolutely need the parental control feature. For about that price there's a number of offerings from a few competitors that offer more bang for the buck.