7x Optical Zoom Webcam

Have a webcam? What other purpose you use your webcam for other than having video chat or video conferencing with friends/family? I don’t know about you, but I do use my webcam as a surveillance camera. My webcam is a cheap one (costs about RM25/US$7) and it is able to zoom digitally for about 5x only. As you might have known, the picture quality is not good using digital zoom.



This 7x optical zoom webcam is definitely a perfect webcam to act as a cheap solution for surveillance, while you can zoom more without compromising the picture quality. In fact, this webcam is just like normal CMOS camera of 1.3-millon pixels. However, it has an edge over other webcams as it has a special telephoto lens to get fixed onto it in order to leverage the optical zoom capability!

The size of DC-NCD130 is considered small as it is only 33mm x 146mm x 37mm, at the weight of 160gm. It has the highest resolution at 1280×1024, with 15 frames per second. Anyway, let’s take a look at the zooming quality :-

While it’s not been used for surveillance, face-tracking feature can be activated and it will act as a video chat camera then.

Of course this awesome webcam does come with a price. It is sold at 9,800 yen (about US$81) with 6 months warranty and a tripod is included too. It’s compatible to Windows 2000/XP with minimum CPU 1GHz, RAM 256MB and harddisk space of 200MB.

(source: sapiensbryan.com)