The original webcam we had was a Logitech E1000 that was purchased at Tesco department store in Prague for about 500 crowns. It almost immediately started acting flaky like it had a bad connection.
Finally today I hooked up a high-end video camera to use as the webcam. This gives a great image although it is overkill for a simple webcam application. But it does allowed for smooth zooming and panning of the image.
Sony HDR-FX1
If you want to know which camera we are using, it’s a Sony HDR-FX1. This is an HDV camera that can record in either HDV or DV mode. The camera is mounted on a Sachtler tripod with a DV-6 head so I get really smooth pans and tilts (not that you can see it in static webcam images).
When I first hooked up the FX1 and fired up the webcam software (EvoCam) it could not find a video stream. So I went into one of the menus in the FX1 and changed the mode from HDV to DV. This fixed the problem.
So now we once again have live feed from our temporary studio set up. One of these days we will just buy an apple iSight webcam. It is expensive ($129) but high quality and a better solution than lugging around a big video camera.
