Labs

The video taken by Creative's Webcam Instant was crisp and clean with no sign of motion blurring while rapid movement and detail was captured well - even in low light. Still images were visibly blotchy, this was particularly noticeable in areas of uniform detail or colour.

This camera's biggest selling point, apart from the price, are the games that come with it. You can play these using the webcam. In one game, for example, you bounce a basketball around your computer screen, in another you have karate fights with cartoon characters.

This sounds like good fun, but you can only play the games inside a very small onscreen box.

Creative's Webcam Center, however, is useful. It lets you do all the usual stuff, capturing video and so on, but it also has a good motion detector.

The Webcam Instant is cheap, but the quality of its stills and games bundle ultimately lets it down.