Microsoft Lifecam HD-5000 720P 16:9 HD Webcam Retail Box Auto Focus Truecolor

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once you turn off the auto-focus this camera is simply perfect.

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For $35 you can't really fault this webcam. It's leaps and bounds better than anything else at its price point. The only gripe I have is that the autofocus is terrible. If you don't turn it off the camera will go out of focus and back every ~30 seconds. The rubber stand thing works pretty well and I was surprised by just how small the thing is. Overall, if you're looking for a cheap webcam buy this one.

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This is a fantastic webcam - the quality difference over a non-HD webcam in clarity is astounding. Definitely worth the price difference, especially when this is on sale for $50 or less!!The mounting system is intuitive and actually works pretty well!

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Impressed how this worked out of the box on ubuntu 10.10; just need to figure out how to disable the auto-focus (I presume you can do this with M$ own Lifecam software)

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Very good picture, works very well in low light, auto focus is slightly annoying at times but if you find the right distance and are not moving too much it works great, like everyone says it can be disabled easily.

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Only thing wrong with this is the auto focus which happens almost every time you use this. Thankfully it can be disabled.

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Excellent price at under $35 when on sale. 720P picture is great and it works well in low light. Auto Focus is a minor irritant but you can disable it. Auto Focus on anything can be tricky as the device is trying to keep an object in focus so if it moves it will try to adjust. For the price and ability to disable the Auto Focus it is still a great deal. You can pay a lot more for a camera that uses different technology to provide superior Auto Focus.

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Excellent price at under $35 when on sale. 720P picture is great and it works well in low light. Auto Focus is a minor irritant but you can disable it. Auto Focus on anything can be tricky as the device is trying to keep an object in focus so if it moves it will try to adjust. For the price and ability to disable the Auto Focus it is still a great deal. You can pay a lot more for a camera that uses different technology to provide superior Auto Focus.

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For 40 dollars, this is definitely a good webcam purchase. The stand isn't all the great, but if like me you're not going to be moving it around a lot, then you can just set it up and the stand should be fine. The autofocus can be a little whacky like people said. It tends to refocus every couple minutes making your picture go all blurry until it's focused. You can easily turn it off in the settings though. Personally I keep it on as I'm not doing much more than skyping with it, and I like that I can hold up a piece of paper to the camera and it'll focus in on it automatically. Worth the occasional blurry refocusing for me. Overall, good product at 40 bucks, probably not the best at 60..

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Good camera, I really like it, since everything else for $40 sucked.

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Excellent price when I PM'ed it at $34.99. 720P picture is excellent and it works great even in low light. Video is smooth through Skype as well. Auto-focusing is really good, but it can be a hit-and-miss if you're trying to have a focus on a specific object (like a paper with text put right in front of it). Drivers and software are automatically detected and installed in Windows 7. Great buy.

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This is great stuff for $40 on sale or price matched. I personally wouldn't pay full price for this unit. If you are considering a camera in the $60 range grab the LifeCam Cinema. It seems to have a slight edge on youtube vids. The Auto-Focus is horrible, if you move 6" either way it goes totally blurry and you have to wait 5 seconds for it to re-focus. Just had to turn it off, had me worried for a tick.It's a tiny bit grainy, if you've ever played mass effect you know what I'm talking about. So go play mass effect, it's a great game. Mic sound is really good. You can use it for gaming. The stand is unique. It's not on a typical stand, but I'm not going to move it much anyways.Much better than the $70 640x480 cam I had from 2 years ago. It's come a long way. Obviously you won't be making any feature films with this thing. Maybe some homemade's. 4.5 stars at $403.5-4.0 stars at regular.

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Do yourself a favor and pick this up if you're in the market for an affordable webcam. It's well worth the extra $10-$20 over the cheapo webcam you're currently considering. Nice HD quality picture and a stand that can be clamped onto just about anything and pointed in almost any direction.Note that this model has an annoying autofocus feature that will refocus the camera even if you move ever so slightly. Luckily this feature is easily disabled.

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I got this for a friend, and turned off the auto-focus in the accompanying software. I found a youtube video showing how to do this. After that, the crazy auto-focus didn't become a problem anymore, and the unit worked quite well in HD.

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I like the colour and clarity of the image and the flexible and adaptable stand is great for placing the camera in many locations.I bought this webcam for use in Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) with ZoneMinder. The camera runs through V4Linux and uses the new UVC V4L2 driver in ZoneMinder. I expect to solve the issues but it is certainly not plug-and-play when using ZoneMinder.

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great webcam, amazingly clear video, superb sound quality, and yepo 720p, but Live Messenger will not let u try and pick 720p for a webcam chat, nor will skype, I think it just knows that no internet connection is that fast, still I wanted to try it...lol but works great auto focus is amazing, just an awesome webcam for sure, great quality