Microsoft LifeCam Cinema

March 19, 2010 | By In Software |

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5 Comments so far

  1. David H on March 19th, 2010

    Ordered the web cam one day and the price was cut $5 the next day. Amazon refused to refund the difference (unlike Best Buy and other competitive stores). Found for $49 at Fry’s. Going to buy there and return this one if it ever arrives. Last Amazon purchase.
    Rating: 1 / 5

  2. Gary M. Watson on March 19th, 2010

    I bought this camera so I could record internal training videos for my team, but it’s an embarassment. There’s no way that I would send out this captured video – it looks like the junk video one gets from an old mobile phone. Any motion results in horrible smear, and even on my brand new dual core Dell E6400 laptop the HD capture mode is almost unusable. If I wanted to lug around a dual quadcore server just to capture video, I’d be MUCH better off spending my money on any consumer video camera and hooking it up via firewire. In fact, my junky 10 year old Sony camcorder hooked up via the firewire port on the Dell looks ten times better at SD than any mode I’ve tried on this LifeCam gadget. The sound doesn’t sync well with the picture at high resolutions, either.

    I guess maybe this thing is better than the free camera that’s built into the Dell laptop, but not by much and certainly not worth the expense. When they said HD video, I assumed that one could actually move around while shooting, but apparently not. How was this thing ever released from Microsoft’s QA labs? Do I need to hook up a $15,000 Dell R710 with a $30,000 RAID system in order to capture HD? (I’m actually going to try that next week to see if that’s the problem…)
    Rating: 2 / 5

  3. Archie Bell on March 19th, 2010

    Stay away from this until they fix the software. It would not go into HD mode, there are yellow upside down yield signs with exlcamation marks next to the highest three resolutions, including HD. When I tried anyway, it gave a message saying that my computer wasn’t able to handle that resolution – but I’m way past the minumum specs that they give (I have 3.4GHz, 4GB RAM, XP Service Pack 3). On the next try it said “there is no camera connected to this computer”, so I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it found it again. It did go into HD after two or three tries. The focus swims in and out, and continues to do so, it’s enough to make one seasick. I tried to use the software update feature from the camera’s dashboard, but it says that I must be connected to the internet for it to work – huh? So I went to Microsoft’s web site and downloaded the software again but it hasn’t helped much if at all. Sometimes when you turn the camera off, the blue “on air” light stays on anyway. I tried to chat with Microsoft support, but you need a Product ID in order to chat with them – their software that was suppossed to detect the Product ID didn’t work, so I tried to manually enter every number I could find on the package, none of them worked. So I have a camera that doesn’t work well, with buggy software, that the apparently PC-unsavvy manufacturer needs to fix, and they won’t even chat with me. For now this is going in the closet and the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 (which works with no issues) is going back on my desk.
    Rating: 1 / 5

  4. K. Cummings on March 19th, 2010

    Before I get into this review, let me explain my system… I have a Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 6GB of memory and a GTX 285 Video Card (high end) with an Intel i7 920 (overclocked) processor (4 cores, 8 threads). Anyway, all that is tech speak for a new high end computer. There shouldn’t be any software or hardware that this computer should not handle! Right? Well, there’s always a 1st… read on to see what I mean…

    …I received the LifeCam Cinema yesterday and was able to connect it up to my computer tonight. I installed the software without problem and then connected the LifeCam Cinema to my computer. There is a small blue light on the front of the LifeCam Cinema and it flashed twice and that’s it. No matter what I tried, the system said that “There is no camera connected to this computer”. I tried multple USB ports and rebooted the computer (which is the standard Windows fix for most problems) although nothing fixed the issue. Therefore, I decided to contact Microsoft Support (which was free by the way) and talked with a very helpful individual for over an hour. The bottom line is that we couldn’t get it to work and he told me something that really shocked me! Get this… are you sitting down?… ready? Here it goes: They have had problems with computers that have more than 4GB of memory and it does not work in those systems! I said “Really?”.. and he confirmed and said that it didn’t make sense to him either, but they are “still working on it”. I am shocked because the specs for this LifeCam Cinema is not low end so you need a pretty good system to run it (to get the full quality out of it). I guess there is a small window that it will work in… not too low, but not too high of a system either. I am shocked! If you have more than 4GB of memory in your computer, I would highly recommend not purchasing this LifeCam Cinema. If you are reading this review a while after it was released (September 2009), then you could try it in hopes that they have fixed the issue, but its up to you.

    The LifeCam Cinema itself was very nice and I was impressed with it. It was smaller than I was expecting and I liked that its “base” was very movable and I as not worried about it sitting on my monitor at all. I am a Microsoft guy all the way so I normally love their products, but this is the first one I had where I will have to return it and give a bad review such as this. Everybody makes bad products sometimes, but it looks like this is one that should have had more more testing on multiple systems before it was released.

    UPDATED: As noted in this thread, the issues were resolved and it is now working great! Therefore, I am updating the rating from 1 star to 4 stars.
    Rating: 4 / 5

  5. lleweck on March 19th, 2010

    Seems to be a good camera. Downloaded and plugged in. It works great.
    Rating: 4 / 5

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