Product Reviews

The people at Philips obviously have fun designing their webcams. Their last effort, which resided in our Top 50 for 15 months, looked like an egg with legs. This time it's a three-legged infant alien that hatches from an egg-shaped carrying pouch - a completely useless feature, but what the heck...

The ToUcam pushes the high image quality of its predecessor still further. Still pictures are more in keeping with a decent digital still camera. Like the others on test, its image sensor has a 640x480 pixel resolution, but still images can go right up to 1280x960. This is technically cheating, as the picture is interpolated by software to achieve the higher figure, but it's done so well that it's a truly desirable feature. Performance is equally impressive, barely dropping a single frame.

Software is reasonably bountiful, though it lacks the integrated finesse of Logitech's, and doesn't include a video editor. We also had trouble getting the video recorder to work, and had to resort to a shareware application for our tests. It's in these areas that the QuickCam Pro strides ahead, but if still image quality is paramount, the Philips is a worthy alternative.