07
Feb
2010
Microsoft LifeCam Cinema
- 720p HD Widescreen Video
- Auto Focus
- High-precision glass element lens
- ClearFrame Technology for smooth, detailed video
- Digital, noise-canceling microphone o
Product Description
This full-featured webcam, with ClearFrame image-processing technology, delivers smooth, detailed video and crystal-clear audio.
Tags: Cinema, LifeCam, Microsoft
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on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Teen Shopping.
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Before I get into this review, let me explain my system… I have a Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 6GB of memory and a GTX 285 Video Card (high end) with an Intel i7 920 (overclocked) processor (4 cores, 8 threads). Anyway, all that is tech speak for a new high end computer. There shouldn’t be any software or hardware that this computer should not handle! Right? Well, there’s always a 1st… read on to see what I mean…
…I received the LifeCam Cinema yesterday and was able to connect it up to my computer tonight. I installed the software without problem and then connected the LifeCam Cinema to my computer. There is a small blue light on the front of the LifeCam Cinema and it flashed twice and that’s it. No matter what I tried, the system said that “There is no camera connected to this computer”. I tried multple USB ports and rebooted the computer (which is the standard Windows fix for most problems) although nothing fixed the issue. Therefore, I decided to contact Microsoft Support (which was free by the way) and talked with a very helpful individual for over an hour. The bottom line is that we couldn’t get it to work and he told me something that really shocked me! Get this… are you sitting down?… ready? Here it goes: They have had problems with computers that have more than 4GB of memory and it does not work in those systems! I said “Really?”.. and he confirmed and said that it didn’t make sense to him either, but they are “still working on it”. I am shocked because the specs for this LifeCam Cinema is not low end so you need a pretty good system to run it (to get the full quality out of it). I guess there is a small window that it will work in… not too low, but not too high of a system either. I am shocked! If you have more than 4GB of memory in your computer, I would highly recommend not purchasing this LifeCam Cinema. If you are reading this review a while after it was released (September 2009), then you could try it in hopes that they have fixed the issue, but its up to you.
The LifeCam Cinema itself was very nice and I was impressed with it. It was smaller than I was expecting and I liked that its “base” was very movable and I as not worried about it sitting on my monitor at all. I am a Microsoft guy all the way so I normally love their products, but this is the first one I had where I will have to return it and give a bad review such as this. Everybody makes bad products sometimes, but it looks like this is one that should have had more more testing on multiple systems before it was released.
UPDATED: As noted in this thread, the issues were resolved and it is now working great! Therefore, I am updating the rating from 1 star to 4 stars.
Rating: 4 / 5