Creative Live! Cam Voice

Many webcams include a mono microphone that's not particularly sensitive. The Skype-compatible Creative Live! Cam Voice goes one step further by building in adaptive-array microphones, which capture the user's voice while minimizing unwanted background and environmental noise. Creative also includes a flexible mount designed to work with both desktop LCD monitors and laptops.
 
The Live! Cam Voice is a black-and-silver plastic device with a wide-angle lens, capable of an 85-degree field of view. The webcam's arm is easy to position and glides smoothly. The integrated Multi-Attach base lets you mount the camera on top of LCD panels and notebook lids. Unfortunately, this device didn't like our Sony HS-95P test monitor and wouldn't lock on, no matter where we mounted it. It never fell from its perch, but it wasn't secure.
 
Getting started took quite a bit of effort. The lengthy installation process went on for nearly 45 minutes and required responses to a bewildering array of prompts. We appreciate the bundled software, which includes Internet-video monitoring and basic video-editing programs, but our experience was a mess. One of the many installers crashed repeatedly on a Sony VAIO test laptop, but we were able to install all the software on a Gateway laptop on the first try.
 
The Live! Cam Voice's image quality was quite good as long as the room was brightly lit. In low-light environments, video images had sickly coloring and poor contrast. Color accuracy, sharpness, and even the frame rate improved once we brightened up the area, though test video recordings were always a bit jerky.
 
The Live! Cam Voice's audio performance was stellar. The built-in mics blocked out nearly all sound to the sides and made crisp, clear recordings of voices directly in front of us. The unit can record in mono or stereo with a wide range of audio settings, all the way up to 16-bit, 96-KHz stereo. Our footage sounded great when using this setting but the resultant video files were huge. Creative includes a headset with a padded earpiece and an adjustable boom mic.
 
The advertised 5-megapixel still shots are a misnomer because the camera's sensor is only 1.3 megapixels. Images looked about as good as those that a 1.3-megapixel camera phone captures. We expected more, given that desktop webcams lack the extreme space constraints that plague cell phones.
 
Considering it's been eleven years since the introduction of the original Connectix QuickCam, we would have liked to see better video quality, though the Live! Cam Voice is no worse than competing models. We could do without the excruciating installation process, otherwise, for the price, this webcam delivers.