Webcam – Low Frames per Second

I was recently messing with the various webcam’s that I own which include the Creative Optia Pro to the Microsoft NX6000 and including a cheap one from ALDI. I was confused why I was only pushing out 6FPS – was there a problem with the computer? The Operating system? Was the bandwidth an issue or was it just plain madness?

The testing continued

I tried the camera across a few different computers and the on Skype / Google Video chat, the first thing that came out was that Skype coped fine but again this was running on the mac and this has no drivers as such. I randomly tried at a different time and across various OS such as Vista, Windows XP and even rebuilt a machine from scratch but nothing shifted those numbers.

The Tech Buzz held the answer

Steve & Shawn from the tech buzz suggested that Auto Expose was dragging down my FPS – so I switched this off and changed the numbers from -2 to -5 which was more in the middle of the slider and almost immediately my FPS went to the full numbers (25 / 30 depending on what I had set). The problem now of course was that the scene was pretty dark due to the fact all I had in my room was a 60W Saver Bulb as follows:

Lighting is the key to a good picture

This solved another problem in fact, the Microsoft NX-6000 pictured above is claimed to be a 2 megapixel webcam but the image quality was very grainy indeed and this turned out to be the fact of lighting once again. If I used this thing during the day with a lot of light in the room – the picture quality was almost perfect but at night, the worst thing you can imagine (but at least it was more FPS).

I am not sure what is worse – a good but very slow picture or a bad but fast picture? Most webcam’s even cheap nasty one’s will produce a good enough picture if your pushing 320×240 but it soon shows the difference when you start to push 640×480 and try to pull of 30FPS – this is were the cheap webcam’s will fall by the way side for sure and it is worth checking the tech spec’s before you part with your money and don’t forget – good lighting is a must no matter what.