My wife went to work. Just got to feel bored at home, as she said to me. I see. In what now is her office whereabouts, near the Kursky railway station, on Yauza embankment the cell coverage is pretty weak so to get through to anyone on the cell needs a very good luck. And, as it became usual practice with her as she chats with her girlfriends from other cities (and Moscovites too), this time she also opted for Skype as her communication means. And therefore I decided to fit her up with some non-expensive web-camera, naturally, with in-built microphone.

I for one have for some years been using a cool HD web-camera from Logitech - QuickCam Ultra Vision for Skype chatting. This is a fairly outdated model (now there are lots of more cool ones), but it is one of the top line models. It features a 2 Mpx matrix (hardly anyone knows for what purpose), picture and video record buttons at its sides and a heavy, slightly buggy but pretty loaded software suite furnishing a user with such options as, for instance, putting on his face some userpic during video conference. May be, the only feature I miss in it is precision zoom control. It seems to be a sort of automatic one, but I guess it is automatic only by hyperfocal distance which is practically unimportant for video conferences, to say the truth. And its price retains even now its tendency towards a hundred dollars than towards those twenty which I was ready to pay for the web-camera of desktop computer of my wife.

So I fell to seeking. Found a lot of different web-cams, even cheaper than this twenty dollars price: starting from a hundred sixty rubles! And this cheapest one I would have bought… Why? Well, simply because it fully satisfies me. Nevertheless, while perusing offers in the net my eye was caught by another one, remarkably more expensive but perfectly fitting into my projected twenty dollars budget.

My eye was not merely caught by it, but glued to it. Its name is SVEN IC-920. It is, of course, made in China, but designed in Finland, Europe. This single fact would be enough for choosing it but its appearance proved to be really grabbing. It’s a striking beauty. The whole of it seems to be made from stainless steel with some imaginary decorative polish. The camera itself is tubular. One would well mistake it for a telescope but for its size. And… my long-nurtured dream, manual precision zoom control feature is here! And the fact that all other parameters are most common, even bordering on the lowest (VGA, 640x480 real matrix resolution), makes no problem at all as even this resolution is too much for Skype video conferences because everything will be inevitably compressed and distorted during transmission be the channel throughput ever so high.

Moreover, the Skype itself does not support any higher resolution even if it is available, in any case, I never could compel it to do this with any web camera however hard I tried.

My web-camera has been brought to me. Lovely packed in cardboard box with plastic window in it through which it could be discerned… just to make my mouth water with its metallic lustre. The first thing I did when I unpacked the web-camera was to try this metallic lustre to find out whether it is perhaps a mere plastic just very cunningly disguised as a stainless steel. When tapped by the screwdriver the camera’s leg sounded suspiciously unclear. But when I got enthusiastic about it and took pains to heat a needle red-hot and tried to stick it in the camera’s leg, nothing came off. It seems to be a real metal.

The tube wrapping appearance was found to be doubtlessly showy metallic one and only focusing unit ornamental ring is made of plastic, but it is so well disguised as metallic one that it first struck me as virtually metallic. It goes without saying that metal is expensive and pretty hefty into the bargain and in this case even technologically pointless, but it has doubtless decorative edge over other materials.

And once fixed (convenient clip, capable of functioning both as a clip for fixing to LCD monitor or notebook PC which for so many years no one has seen without in-built web-cameras and as legs for placing onto the table or on top of LCD monitor) the web-camera would make you forget at once even about the plastic of the focusing unit ornamental ring as it strikes as authentic stainless steel from the distance of as long as two or three centimeters. The web-camera showed itself pretty fit for Skype use: it was identified by my PC no sooner than I inserted it into USB slot, and went on showing itself as such – the performance one would normally require of it.

The shell turned to be the Microsoft AMCAMP, while the drivers are directly from SVEN or from the Chinese fabricators (and cruftsmen too) of the hardware. A bit buggy ones, but they can be made quite operable when trying hard. In any case I did it. Among its features are editing of picture by brightness, contrast, gamma, tone, saturation, selection of electric frequency (to suppress flickering), enlargement of picture, enabling a pretty absurd “face tracking” feature (picking only a face out of a whole frame) and overlaying the frame with various effects and settings.

There is also a feature to start video record (software) or to save photos by pressing a button on the tube.

To sum up, there is nothing special inside the web-camera (though everything is in place, everything is available) but its exterior is well pleasing, the fact which for many people (just as it was for me) may turn to be very important for their decision-making and quite worthy of another extra ten dollars.