Labs

The 380's big claim to fame is that it has a fast USB 2 interface, operating at up to forty times faster than the older USB 1.1 connections used by most cameras here. You'll only be able to use this to its full potential if you actually have USB 2 ports on your PC, though. Unfortunately the fastest connection in the world won't make up for a camera that doesn't work as it should do. Try as we might, we just couldn't get the 380 to work at its stated maximum resolution for video of 640x480. The best it would do was display a patch of video in the top right-hand corner of its software screen. No microphone is built in, either. We could forgive this if the rest of the package was good, but it comes on top of a host of other niggles. On the bright side, the software is generally pretty good at most of its other functions, which include tricks like motion detection and uploading images to a Web site. It's still not enough to recommend this camera, though.