iSight Equipped

Yesterday, the wife and I decided to grab an iSight with some of our gift money. Our primary reason was that we wanted to have the ability to videoconference with my in-laws who are now located in the US. We've mucked around with it last night, and it certainly looks promising. I am quite impressed with the video quality of the iSight. It certainly beats out the PC offerings hands-down. It took me a while to get our iChat talking to AIM, and the key to get it all going (after 1.5 hours tinkering with the firewall) was an extra restart on the PC. :P I'm not convinced that the CCD or any internal electronics of the iSight impact the quality as much as the optics. The lens is certainly much larger than the highest-quality Logitech offerings I saw, and the auto-focus seems to be a unique feature to the iSight. The resulting image is very warm, and exactly what I'd expect from a high-quality digital camera (but with a 1/4" 640x480 CCD). So now that I have access to an iSight, I'm certainly not going to let it go to waste. I plan to try using the iSight to film some how-to videos for making measurements. The iSight will act more as a high-quality microphone than a video capture device in practice, however. We'll see how much use I can get out of it outside of videoconfrences. Delicious Library sure provided a few minutes of entertainment. :) Oh, and if any of you out there wield iSights, I'd sure like to see what iSight-to-iSight chats are like. :)