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The Vesta Pro comes with two software that allows you to make use of its video recording capabilities.

One of these programs, Philips; own generic video capture software allows you to make digital home videos of resolutions ranging from 320x240 to 640x480. The capture program is pretty flexible and allows you to choose to record audio, change the number of frames per second, and control the amount of time you’d like to have a video capture run. In principle these features are great, but because we were limited to using a regular v1.1 USB connection, which tops out at around 12Mpbs, we had a lot of problems with dropped frames when trying to record anything at 30 frames per second (even a lowly 320x240 resolution video had around 30% frames dropped). By contrast, when we went to a more reasonable 24 frames per second capture, even a 352x288 cappture managed to keep all but a few frames intact. No matter how I played with the settings however, I could not get a good capture at 640x480, even with the frames set all the way down to 15 there was still a significant amount of data lost. Philips provides a good FAQ which includes some details as to why this happens. Whether the camera itself can handle actually capture a 640x480 video at 24-30 fps is something we won’t know due to the other limitations of the system. Obviously the 12Mbps v1.1 USB throughput is a bottleneck, but so is the actual ability of the hard drive to write at a high enough speed to accommodate higher resolution streams. USB 2.0 is coming out soon, with its amazing 480Mpbs throughput (which comes close to the first incarnations of FireWire), and I hope to see some dramatic improvements once we get a USB 2.0 card in here.

Vesta Pro with the webcam feet attached

Vesta Pro: Digi Cam

I started testing the Vesta Pro with the intent on focusing most of my time on the video/web cam and scanner properties, but I ended up spending an even larger amount of time taking still pictures than I did making video captures.

While I was making scans I found myself wishing time and again that the camera could automatically adjust its focus, rather than forcing the user to manually focus the lens. When I began to play with the Vesta Pro more like a digi cam, I found the manual focus to be just as annoying – until I started doing some macro shots.

There is a driver setting which tells the system to automatically adjust the exposure/lighting of the images, so the camera behaves like a true digicam in the sense that you don’t have to keep adjusting all the settings manually. This was rather encouraging because when I played with my first webcam a few years back, it had horrible lighting adjustments that made taking still pictures all but impossible. With the Vesta Pro, you have to manually focus the lens to get a good picture, but the quality of near shots is surprisingly good for a webcam. At the max 800x600 resolution the picture quality isn’t as good as a regular digital camera, but I managed to produce excellent shots after some touch-ups using the included Photo Express 2.0 SE software. With a slight resize (around 75% of the original) and some lighting changes, pictures look extremely good. That’s no to say the camera doesn’t have its limitations. In taking pictures of subjects further than 20-30 feet, we found the quality degraded quickly. In fact, most pictures turned out best when the subjects were around 10-15 feet from the camera (it IS after all a digicam).

What was surprising was the ability to take the most amazing Macro shots. Thanks to the manual focus, I was able to take macro shots from distances as little as ½ an inch from the objects being photographed… and the results come out very nicely. Our Canon PowerShot A5 Zoom can’t take a macro shot at any less than 3-4 inches of distance, and it costed more than twice what you would pay for the Vesta Pro. Truly, if you are interested in taking macro shots this camera is amazingly good for such a simple device.

Conclusion

The Vesta Pro Scan digicam was an interesting idea from the start, but perhaps some of the execution didn’t pan out as nicely as we would have hoped. I really liked being able to quickly scan newspaper clippings and magazine articles without the time and fuss of a regular flatbed scanner, but the limitations of the Vesta Pro make it less than ideal for any serious text to digital document scan requirements. The video capture is more than adequate, though we had trouble creating fullmotion (24fps) captures at the maximum resolution of 640x480. Philips claims that the camera captures 30fps video clips at 640x480, but our system just couldn’t handle, and we doubt any system can do any better until USB 2.0 cards start hitting the streets (around March to April 2001). Perhaps the most impressive and surprisingly effective aspect of the camera is its simple still picture capture capability. With some minor touchups and judicious resizing of the images, you can get some pretty good results. The real kicker of course is the amazing quality of macro still shots – something I would never have dreamed of finding in a multi-purpose webcam. At $99 MSRP, the Vesta Pro scan doesn’t come cheap, and it certainly doesn’t scan nearly as nice as a $130 dedicated flatbed, but you can’t make cheesy home videos, or video email clips, or take macro still shots using a flatbed, no matter what you try ;).

Overall Score: 81%