Philips Vesta Pro Scan PC Camera Review - PAGE 1

I’m not the type to really get googly eyed over technology that hasn’t lived up to its expectations, and so in general I have been avoiding most “webcams” like the plague. Why you may ask? Well for starters, webcams have never been as cool as their TV counterparts would have you believe. You don’t get full screen, full motion web conferencing. You get sub par quality still frame “pictures”. And most people just don’t really like having a camera at point blank range while pecking away at the keys. This probably makes you question why I’m now saddled down and writing a review on the Philips Vesta Pro Scan, which is essentially a souped-up webcam. The answer is quite simple: Philips has taken their USB desktop/web camera and made it into a quasi portable scanning device. The result? A quaint little webcam with surprisingly useable still shots, and that also doubles as a limited, but functional scanner.

The Vesta Pro's Box Shot & the Box's Contents

In all honesty, I requested to review the cam, right after I was told it could scan images and text off of the desktop. I was intrigued by the idea: point the camera at a sheet of paper, click on a button or two in the software and voila, 30 seconds later you have a good chunk of text or images that you can directly cut and paste into whatever application you need. Maybe I was just caught off guard by novelty of the idea, but somehow the concept of cameras that can also scan documents really appealed to me.

Installation and General Overview

The Vesta Pro comes with a miniature tripod with telescopic legs. When mounted on the tripod, you the camera can be tilted and rotated enough that it can be positioned to aim at nearly any type of document or object, which is a big plus.

Camera installs using a single USB cable, through which it gets its power and through which both the video AND audio recordings are transferred. This single USB cord design is even more appealing for laptop users. The cord is just over 5’ in length and stretches enough to allow some freedom of placement when you need to use the camera on your desktop. Without the freedom of a longer cord though, most of the still pictures you take with the Vesta Pro will be limited to the immediate area around your workstation, though laptop users will be able to take the camera nearly anywhere they like.

As far as capabilities go, the specs state that the camera can record video at up to 640x480 resolution at 30 frames per second. It can also take still pictures in resolutions of 640x480 and 800x600 – a spec that Philips hopes will reel in those who may want a simple digital camera. Audio can be recorded simultaneously with video, via the built in microphone, so you can literally make simple home videos with this setup, provided you don’t mind limiting those videos to your computer den (for those of you without laptops). The camera has an manually adjustable lens that you have to fiddle with to get the sharpest picture or scan, but the lack of autofocus may just have made this the most versatile little multi-purpose cam ever.

Software wise the camera comes with Xerox’s PageCam for OCR and text/graphics page scanning, MS Netmeeting (a free download), a special edition of Ulead’s Photo Express 2.0 for still captures and basic photo editing, and Smith Micro’s VideoLink Mail, which enables you to attach self-executable video clip files to email. More about the software later.

Vesta Pro: Scanner

Because this is the feature which first caught my attention, I was eager to see just what the Vesta Pro was capable of, when paired with the excellent Xerox PageCam software. PageCam is the brains behind the operation, really, aided, of course, by the unusually good macro quality of the Vesta Pro. The workings are quite simple. You position the camera to take a close range “scan” of the document of interest, and the PageCam software basically takes a snapshot of the document and then applies some OCR magic on the resulting pic. After that process, you can cut and paste any of the graphics straight from PageCam and into your favourite editor (we were using Paint Shop Pro). Text is also automagically selectable, even though to all outward appearances the scan looks like nothing more than a simple macro shot of a document. You can highlight text and then copy and paste it into word, notepad, or any other document that allows windows cut&paste operations. The entire procedure, from the time you start the scan to the time it takes for you to copy and paste the text is less than 20 seconds, literally.