You can’t be the world’s coolest cam freak if your webcam sucks. Even if you’ve got the trashiest internet poses this side of Stickam, no one wants to watch your grainy low-resolution feed on their computer with so many other distractions available online. Be the coolest attention whore in town with Microsoft’s new LifeCam Cinema, the first consumer webcam to offer 720p motion capture at 30fps.
Putting on a live web show? Videoconferencing with clients in Skype? Chatting with distant family and friends on Messenger? Do everyone on the other end of the interaction a favor and show them your mug in high-quality video.
Apart from the 1,280 x 720 capture resolution (yep, not the lame 960 x 720 that other supposedly “HD” webcams do), the LifeCam Cinema comes with 4X optical zoom and a noise-cancelling microphone mounted around the panel’s top. Microsoft makes sure the camera lasts you a good while, fitting it with a durable aluminum body and a glass lens. It also ships with a mount that attaches to notebooks and desktop displays, alike.
Ready to be immortalized in HD-quality screen caps forever? Not so fast. Plugging the best webcam performer into your PC’s USB port isn’t exactly that simple, as LifeCam has some seriously steep hardware requirements. For the 720p capture peripheral, Microsoft recommends a system with at least a 3GHz dual core processor and 2GB of RAM – serious hardware for something as ridiculously basic as a webcam. It should work (with some hiccups, most likely), however, with a minimum 1.6GHz machine.
The LifeCam Cinema is scheduled to come out in September for a $79.99 retail price.
[via Slashgear]