Video Capture

What about video capture? Well, I've a short clip of myself typing this review. It was captured at the resolution of 320x240 on my system with the following specs :-

Well, here's the clip. It's a 2:29 seconds MPEG clip... and yeah, that's me. Don't laugh! :)

Click for the MPEG clip

As you can see, the capture is quite smooth. You can also see the white balance and exposure auto controls in action. But note that when I captured the video using Adobe Premiere, it reported about a loss of about 50% of the total number of captured frames. This effectively reduces the frame rate to 15fps. As the compression of the clip is totally software based, this issue may be due to a few factors.

First, my processor could be too slow in processing the clip. However, I do not think that's the case because the loss of frames occurs at all resolutions. The next suspect would be my hard disk's performance. My ATA-66 card died so I had to run my hard disk off the on-board ATA-33 controller. Therefore, the hard disk might be a little slow in storing the frames.

Finally, the USB transfer rate could be too slow. This is why higher-end solutions use either SCSI or Firewire to transfer video. For a higher transfer rate.

Battery Life

After using the camera for over three weeks, the battery meter hasn't even registered a drop at all! This is simply amazing. It is said that the batteries can last over 3000 snapshots in normal mode! That makes the AmazingCam VQ680 one of the most power- efficient digital cameras out there.