I updated my presentation camera rig this week with a new camera. I replaced the old Quickcam for Notebooks Deluxe with a Dynex 1.3MP Web Cam. I was hoping that going from 640x480 to 1280x1024 would solve a lot of the problems with the 0.1 setup. Alas, it did not.

I encountered two primary problems. First, Cheese would occasionally turn into a slide show when capturing at full res with a maximized window. It was very annoying. The frame-to-frame lag was long enough for me to write an entire word. The other problem, and this is the deal breaker, is that the camera has a fixed focus distance of about thee feet. If I position the camera three feet from the writing pad, the writing pad occupies about 640x480 of the captured image. Fail.

I guess I need a camera that will stream at 1.3MP (or better) and either automatically focus or a focus adjustment (the old camera had the latter). Cameras that I could find on the net that meet these requirements all cost $70 or more. Meh.

I have an alternate plan, but I'll have to actually write some code. I have an older Canon PowerShot A70 that I don't use. I seem to recall that there are some libraries available that allow real-time capture of single frames directly from the camera. The library basically tells the camera to take a picture, and then it downloads that picture. If I can get it to stream fast enough, say 10fps to 15fps, that should be a usable solution.

Given that nobody has written a V4L driver to stream from these cameras in this manner, I suspect that I may be heading down a road of disappointment. If it wasn't for disappointment, I wouldn't have any appointments.