It can take still images, so you can use it as a portable camera in conjunction with a laptop, or as a webcam. Even better, it can also capture continuous live video, so you can use it for video teleconferencing and for digitizing videotapes. It works with Windows 98, 98 SE, and Windows ME. It comes with plenty of software for those uses and others, and it even comes with some video-based games.

It doesn't come with an on/off switch, so if you leave it hooked up to your PC and you want to make sure it isn't taking pictures of you while you are sitting at your computer daydreaming, you can close its lens with a little sliding "privacy shutter."

The lens is of fairly good quality, although you can't change it or mount a different lens on the camera. There is a simple focus knob on the camera, so you can take pictures as close as 1 1/2 inches away. There is no physical zoom control, but you can use the camera's software to zoom the image electronically. There is also a recessed pushbutton to take a snapshot so you don't have to click the mouse.

The camera uses a CCD image sensor with 640 x 480 pixels. It's fairly sensitive in low light levels, although it's not specialized for taking pictures in the dark. Like most CCD sensors, it is pretty sensitive to infrared light. Various companies are selling infrared lights for use with modern camcorders; you could take nighttime video shots with this camera if you had one of those infrared lights. Incidentally, you can use the camera to check the batteries in your infrared TV and VCR remote controls: merely aim the remote at the camera and press buttons on the remote. If the remote is working, the camera will show the infrared light as a beautiful white/violet glow.

The USB cable is on the rear of the camera. It's just a little bit stiff for such a light camera: it makes it harder to aim the camera if you don't have the camera stuck down. The cable is about 10 feet long. There are no extra USB connectors on the camera—it's not a "hub," so you cannot plug other USB devices into it. If you've only got one USB port on your PC and you want to use more than one USB device at a time, you'll need to get an external USB hub.

The only other physical feature of the camera is its standard composite video input connector. That is on the back of the camera. You use it to plug a VCR into the camera, for example, so that you can take snapshots or movies from a video tape. The camera also comes with two other video and audio cables that let you connect the camera and your PC to other video and audio equipment.

The software is a set of programs collectively called "Intel Create & Share Software." They are aimed at home users, and can be run from within a simple integrated graphical environment that features plenty of online help. The main concepts of the environment are that you click on large, detailed icons to perform actions; that your files are stored in "galleries" of thumbnail images; and that you can create multimedia "projects" that incorporate your files.

Menus are not used very much, but there are plenty of popup dialogs. You can get a lot done without reading any instructions at all, but the on-line manuals are pretty good. I found that it worked well to just fool around with the software until I was comfortable with it, and then read the online manuals later on to learn about shortcuts and capabilities that I hadn't already discovered. The graphical environment lets you get things done, but it has its flaws. I'll point them out as they come up later.

It's all pretty simple and obvious, and the default settings usually work quite well. If you do need to change the way that anything works (for example, to choose between the live camera and a VCR connected to the video input), you can right-click on the window and choose from several menu entries. One of them leads to specific options for controlling the way the still snapshots are taken; another one pops up a standard dialog for controlling the camera settings.

You can adjust many different camera and software settings, from the size of the final image to its color balance. You can flip or mirror the image, adjust its sharpness, and control how much of your computer's processor power is taken up in managing the camera.

The next basic task is recording a video. Again, this can come from the live camera or from a VCR, video game, or other standard composite video source. Selecting the icon pops up an "Intel Scene Recorder" application which shows you the live video and a number of control and adjustment buttons.

This application is more complex than the Snapshot application, and the style is a bit different. For example, you access the options by using buttons that are always visible, not by right-clicking on the video window. This makes the application more intimidating than Snapshot. There are more options, too, and I found that I usually had to try a few different menus and tabs before I found the option that I wanted to change. Despite these cosmetic issues, the application works quite well, and its default settings usually get the job done just fine.

The Scene Recorder's buttons and menus let you adjust the sound level, trim off unwanted bits at the start and end of the video, and save the video to disk as an .AVI file. Any further editing is done with the Create & Share "Build a Movie" advanced application, which I'll describe later.

Another basic task is recording audio. This is done with Intel's Audio Recorder, a fairly simple application. It lets you adjust the microphone level, record your narration, play it back, and save it. It has a graphical indicator that shows the volume level and the current playback point. It only uses the microphone input on your system's sound card, and it gives you no options for adjusting your sound file. If you read the help files carefully, however, you will learn that a dialog accessed from a Create & Share menu lets you specify the quality of the sound file when you record it.

The icon for the final basic task is mysteriously labeled "Other Devices." On my system, clicking it merely popped up a little message that there were "No Other Devices Installed." Searching the Help file revealed that this icon actually looks for other installed TWAIN-compliant devices that you could use to import a still or video file into the Create & Share software apps. TWAIN is a standardized method for Windows to control scanners and some video cameras and digitizers. The Intel software makes the camera act as a TWAIN device itself (more about that later), but without any other TWAIN devices in my system, I couldn't investigate this feature further.

For starters, you can choose to "Send an E-mail Postcard." When you click the icon for this kind of project, the Create & Share software leads you through the steps of the project. First you choose a template from among dozens in various themes such as "Home & Family," "Business," "Hobby," and so on. These are pre-drawn graphical backgrounds, with spaces for you to insert text or an image. The image can be a still or a video; the text can be a subject line, a message block, "To:" and "From:" fields, etc.

Recent "To:" fields are saved by the software for your convenience. After you fill in the spaces, you choose whether to send the postcard immediately or to save it to disk for you to send yourself. You can save the postcard as a .JPG file (with movies reduced to a single unmoving frame, with no audio) or as a self-playing .EXE file. When your recipient receives the file, they can read your text, look at the stills, and play the movies. Of course, these files can make pretty bulky e-mail attachments; and nowadays, you'll probably want to warn the recipients in advance that you are sending them an attachment, so that they don't delete it out of fear of e-mail viruses.

The e-mail postcard project is easy to use, but it is theme-oriented and it works with pre-recorded media files. If instead you want to record and e-mail a video without a backdrop, you can use the "Video E-mail" project. This doesn't lead you through the process step-by-step; instead, it pops up an application very similar to the Intel Scene Recorder. It lets you record a movie with sound, fill in "To:" and "From:" and "Subject" fields, and e-mail it directly.

You don't get to save the e-mail to disk for later transmission. This leads to a bug: if you are not already online when you press the "Send it!" button, the application will lock up. You can prevent that by setting options that let the application automatically dial up your e-mail provider for you. Another option lets you send a pre-recorded video instead of recording one on the fly; and of course you can trim and save the live video file.

If you are even more ambitious, you can choose the icon to "Make a Video Phone Call." Intel's help file says that this is easy to do, but I have to admit that I haven't dared try this one yet (and I also don't have any particular need to do it). The icon starts up Intel's NetMeeting software, which uses special "directory servers" on the Internet that list other users who can accept or place these video phone calls. It's done either using your Internet connection, or directly to another party using your modem, so I imagine that, while low-cost, your video performance probably varies quite a bit.

Another project icon lets you "Build a Home Page." This is another step-by-step project using graphical templates. The process lets you build a Web page containing image, movie, and sound files. It's all very similar to the e-mail postcard project, except that the end result is a set of files of HTML code and media files. When displayed with a standard browser, the files show the Web page that you created.

You can "publish" those files to your hard disk; to a remote Web page using popular Internet protocols such as FTP; or to an e-mail recipient. It's all made about as easy as possible, given the technical nature of the project. I only tried publishing to my own hard disk; it worked quite well.

A few of the templates let you create a Web page that contains an image that is automatically updated every few seconds. This lets you set up your own webcam with live images; visitors to your Web site will always see the latest images, automatically. If you need a live webcam site, this camera and software make it easy to do.

The "Build a Movie" icon leads you through another step-by-step process; this one lets you put together text pages, still images, and moving video to create simple movies. Simple is the key word here: you can connect the pieces of your movie using very simple transitions such as fading from one scene to another or cutting between scenes abruptly, but you cannot do any fancy special effects. Furthermore, there is no separate sound track that can span scenes: any sound in the final movie is merely whatever sound was in the individual scenes.

You arrange the scenes in your movie by dragging and dropping them onto a very simple "storyboard": a timeline. The final product of the movie-making process is a single new AVI movie file. The original image and video files that went into making your movie remain unchanged on disk. You can save the steps that you followed in making the movie as a project file, so that you can edit the movie more later. You wouldn't want to do any serious video editing using such simple software, but it might be all that you need to edit a few family vacation videos, for example.

Another icon launches "Intel Auto Snapshot." This application can be quite fun: it takes still images at pre-arranged intervals, or it takes still images if it detects "motion" using the camera. By motion they mean a noticeable change in the pixels of the image; they don't mean to imply that the software "understands" that a person is walking through the image from left to right, for example. The software would also take a picture if a person walked through in the other direction, or if a dog walked past the camera, or if a bright light shone in through a window.

This application leads you through configuring the auto snapshot feature, and then it leaves a small application running in the Windows task bar. It keeps on running in the background even after you exit the Create & Share environment, and it does not pop up on the screen whenever it takes a picture. So, it really does run quite automatically, after you've set it up.

The setup options are pretty flexible. You can make it take time-based snapshots, 24 hours a day, or just within specific times, as often as you like. If you set it up for motion detection instead, you can adjust its sensitivity, adjust how long it waits before taking the picture after it notices motion, and even make it take a single image and then wait for more motion before taking more images, or take a stream of images when it detects motion. Images can be captioned with a custom caption of your choice, and the caption can include the date and time that the image was taken.

What does it do with all of these automatic pictures? Well, you can make the program save them to disk, e-mail them somewhere, or post them to the Internet. If you e-mail them or post them, you need to set up some information so that the program knows where to send the files. It can even dial your ISP for you, if you set it up properly.

If you choose to save the automatic snapshots to disk, they can all have the same filename so that the latest image replaces the earlier ones; they can have unique filenames so that all of the images are saved; or they can cycle through filenames so that, for example, only the ten most recent images are saved and older ones are obliterated.

Pressing this icon starts up a "special edition" suite of games from Reality Fusion, Inc. The games use live video from the camera to let you swat at virtual balls and bubbles, or to make live video op-art set to music from your PC's CD drive. It's really very impressive; the software is doing a lot of processing to interact with the live video from the camera. The "Shoop" basketball game is a good example, so I'll explain it in more depth.

In "Shoop" you see yourself in a live video window covering part of the screen. The rest of the screen shows a basketball court, with a scoreboard, one or two hoops, and a basketball. There are also crowd sound effects. As the basketball bounces around, you can swat at it. If your moving image hits it, the basketball moves realistically—you can swat it up, down, and sideways. With practice, you can swat it into one of the hoops, scoring two points for your side.

Well, maybe for your side: the software doesn't recognize you, so if you accidentally send the ball through the wrong hoop, you will score points for your opponent. So a real two-player game can be a lot of fun, as you and your opponent swat at the imaginary basketball and jostle for good positions. (A hint: stand far enough from the camera that most of your body is visible in the video; otherwise, the ball tends to bounce off your body in unpredictable ways.)

Similar games let you bounce a large ball around a zero-gravity room, or pop falling bubbles. All of them are fun and fairly non-violent (the falling bubbles game has silly things like cartoonish hammers and anvils that squash your video image, and so on). You can actually work up a little sweat with them, which is more than I can say for most computer games. Children love them, and adults find them intriguing.

The games have some extra video options that add to their "eye candy" factor. For example, they let you surround your image with twinkling "fairy dust" that trails after your movements. Some of the games use video transparency, making you a little ghostlike: you can see the game background through the live video. Some of them put small still images of the players into their scoreboards. All of the games have sound effects and silly icons like floating cows, and let you set some of the options by using your live video image to press big virtual pushbuttons on the screen.

Finally, the "Jumpin Video" game is really a performance art piece, not a game (but it's still a great way to keep a child busy indoors on a rainy day!). Reminiscent of the Sixties and psychedelic op-art, it shows the camera's video, heavily modified and changing in real time as you move in front of the camera. Depending on your settings, the video reflects, splits up, multiplies—it outlines you, changing your image into a rainbow against a black background, burning and then leaving smeared Technicolor images that fade away. There are dozens of effects, all accompanied by music from your PC's CD-ROM drive, if you put an audio CD into it, or by a default rock and roll track that encourages you to get up and dance around in front of your keyboard. It's... groovy!

Reality Fusion has other games available for free download (if you give them your e-mail address; I haven't downloaded any) at their Web site. They also have information on their other live video products, and a list of the cameras that they support.

I have written some TWAIN programs myself, so I tried one of them with the camera. My program is a simple "copier" program that lets me use my scanner and laser printer together to make photocopies of documents. When my program starts, it shows me which TWAIN devices are plugged into the system. If I choose the Intel camera, Intel's Image Source software pops up. It lets me adjust the camera, take snapshots, view them full-sized or as thumbnails, and transfer them to my copier program. Once it gets them from the scanner, my program prints them out on the default Windows printer. It all worked perfectly with the Intel camera; I was quite pleased.

Although I was impressed, the software is not perfect. While writing this column, I discovered that closing the "Take Snapshot" window would make the Create & Share graphical environment stop working, if you didn't first use the undocumented "Turn Camera Off" command from a menu that pops up when you right-click on the snapshot window. That fix took a little while to discover!

The problem cropped up after I had been using the camera and software for several months; it did not originally behave that way. I checked that by temporarily installing the camera and software on another PC: it didn't have the problem. It's annoying, but it's not a show-stopper.

While figuring that problem out, I tried reinstalling the software, and learned a few interesting things. First, Intel seems to be aware that the software can become unstable: their uninstaller provides a "repair" feature that reinstalls the software without much user interaction (it didn't help this problem, anyway). Second, uninstalling the software removes much of it, but not all of it. For example, the TWAIN drivers were still in place. Also, the images that I had put into the gallery were still in place (that was nice; it would have been a shame if they were deleted).

After the "repair" option didn't fix the problem, I tried uninstalling and then re-installing the software. That didn't help either, but it showed another bug: The Galleries still listed old images that I had deleted between the uninstallation and the re-installation. The gallery showed thumbnails with question marks for the images that were not present. I had to highlight each unwanted thumbnail and press the Del key to delete the incorrect thumbnails. Intel should have made their software check that the full-sized image was still there before it showed the thumbnail file. It's not a killer problem, although it can be confusing.

Besides those bugs, there are some user interface problems, too. As I used the software more and more, I got the feeling that it was created by different programmers with different styles, and that it's not as well integrated as it could be. For example, the different programs have various kinds and qualities of online help, some better than others, some incomplete. Some use tooltips, other use a question mark cursor, and some mix the two together, with varied degrees of completeness.

There are also strong differences in the way the user interfaces work: some are methodical and step-by-step, with very simple screens that lead you through a process without giving you an overwhelming number of choices all at once. But others are much less polished, being based on a single window with plenty of buttons and controls to perform actions and set up options. Since the complete package is obviously aimed at neophytes and home users, not video power users, Intel should have spent more time making all of the programs consistent. They started the job, but I would guess that they stopped about 2/3 of the way through, packaged what they had, and shipped it. It's not bad, but it could be better.

So if you want, you can ignore the integrated environment. However, I would still use it, because of its Galleries with their thumbnail views of your multimedia files. The thumbnails are big enough that they let you tell the images apart easily, without having to load and view each image.

You can create your own galleries and "put" multimedia files into them. When you do that, you are not actually creating a new directory for the gallery, nor are you actually moving files from one part of your hard disk to another. Instead, you are merely creating entries and thumbnail images in a hidden database that is part of the Intel Create & Share software. That makes the galleries fairly fast and efficient. If you work with lots of multimedia files, you may already have acquired an image organizer program to keep track of your files. If you haven't, the Intel environment acts as a pretty nice one. Of course, if you are using Windows ME, you can view thumbnails of some kinds of files using Windows Explorer anyway, so you might not want to use the Galleries.

And the other bottom line? $40. That's right; counting a nice rebate from Intel, the whole package cost me about $40 at Costco a few months ago; other retailers have offered similar prices. Not a bad bottom line, at all.

Intel Pro Video PC Camera
$99.99 MSRP
Intel
Flash 360º View