Labs

This little cam not only has a very good autofocus feature built in, but also uses face tracking to keep the subject sharp. We did our best to flummox it by moving quickly backwards and forwards and left to right, which was fun, but both features coped well.

The catch is that if you push the resolution up further than 640x480 pixels, autofocus and face tracking are disabled. We soon found out why: when we turned the Genius up to its highest video setting, 1280x1024, it didn't seem able to process the large amounts of data necessary to update a fast-moving video picture with that many pixels; instead, it just froze. To be fair, this was probably more than we could reasonably expect of it.

Image quality was nothing like as sharp or natural as the pictures from the Creative cameras or even the Logitechs, but still pretty good. We could see the texture of the subject's hair and details of the books on the shelf behind. The cam itself isn't a thing of beauty, but can easily be tilted both up and down and left to right, which is useful.

This is a good webcam for £20 less than the superior Creative models.