One last note on the image quality: the LifeCam Show features a wide-angle lens. While it might let you gather the whole family in front of your laptop for a group chat, it also has the effect of placing your talking head farther from camera when compared with the LifeCam VX-5500. And while there is a zoom slider in the properties window, it did nothing to bring my mug into the foreground. The Pan and Tilt settings also did nothing to adjust the image.
The new 3D video effects include face-tracking technology, so you can conduct video chats with a distorted head or while wearing a funny hat. The collection of video effects is a big improvement over the lame collection of 2D graphics of past LifeCams. Still, the software has some annoying quirks, such as auto check boxes under the settings tab that you cannot check. And while its low-light performance was acceptable (when not shooting at 800x600), the Low Light Compensation check box is grayed out. Lastly, the LifeCam window shows only your last video or still image captured as opposed to the more useful strip of thumbnails that Logitech's QuickCam software provides.
You can also share video messages via a Vista Gadget, but you'll need to have a Vista PC and a LifeCam on both ends of the exchange. Maybe Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates exchange video messages in this manner, but I doubt many others will find this feature all that useful. I did not test this feature. I did try out Microsoft's Video Messages Web site, which anyone with any Webcam, LifeCam, or otherwise can use--you need a Windows Live ID. The site, tabbed as being in beta, offers 2GB of online storage space and lets you record videos up to 2 minutes in length. The site was slow to load, buggy, and unintuitive, and it worked only in IE for me.
Microsoft backs the LifeCam Show with a three-year warranty. It does not work with Macs.
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