Quality web cam but forget about taking pictures

Author's Rating:

Pros: quality web cam - smooth installation - software - basic off-line cam

Cons: poor quality offline pics - drains batteries almost instantly

The Bottom Line: 
The ClickSmart 310 is an excellent webcam. It installs without a glitch and comes with neat software. As a low-end digital cam it is a real stretch. Better alternatives exist.

Author's Review
I needed a quality web cam for my new PC that I could also take off-line for some quick shoots. I have owned a Logitec Traveler before and I was more than happy with that little marvel: amazing web cam quality and very decent off-line pictures, even under difficult light conditions.

Unfortunately the Traveler was not available anymore and so I went off searching for a similar Logitec product. Soon I found out that it had actually been replaced by two other models: the ClickSmart 310 and the ClickSmart 510. The former being slightly lower specs than my Traveler and the latter clearly being higher (includes flash, higher resolution etc).

I decided to go for the 310 since I primarily needed the web cam feature and the off-line use where the spec differed, did not matter so much. So I got 310 cam from BestBuy for $75. That was slightly less than my Traveler.

Now, it installed under WinXP as I expected from a quality product: without a single glitch. That was as easy as it gets. Operating it as a web cam is equally easy and the standard software (Logitec QuickCam Suite) makes all other uses a no brainer as well. The software is really extensive: it contains a lot of functions I never use, but it is fun exploring the capabilities of your cam when you first use it.

The web cam quality is really fine. Same as I was used to see from 640x480 resolution Logitec products. You can adjust a number of settings to adapt the picture to the room lighting condition so you can produce a high quality video stream under almost all conditions.

Now the main drawback. Despite the fact that I paid less than for my Traveler, I feel that the 25 bucks difference is not worth the step-down in quality still camera use. Where as the Traveler with it's 640x480 resolution was able to produce pictures that could stand a comparison with 1 megapixel digital cams (pictures viewed on a PC screen), the ClickSmart 310 produces blurry ill-colored pictures that are just no good enough to be used for anything else than playing around with the cam to learn its features.

If you are really looking for a product that you can use both as a low-end still camera and a quality web cam, I would either recommend the ClickSmart 510 (or my Traveler if you would come across it) or go for a cheap Logitec web cam and a low end megapixel digital cam. You are going to spend slightly more than you would spend on the ClickSmart 310, but you will find yourself actually using the still camera feature. With the ClickSmart 310 you will give up after the first few trial shots.
If you are just looking for a quality web cam, you could as well go for the dedicated Logitec web cam for about the same quality as you get with the 310, but for half the price.

For completeness I also need to mention that for some reason WinXP not consistently recognizes the cam when the batteries have ran out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. An inconvenience, not more, since removing the batteries and reconnecting it eliminates the issue.

Oh, the batteries drain faster than you can replace them, but that is not exceptional for a digital cam.