Hello again, my name is Rodney Reynolds. And welcome to another video review. Today, I will be looking at the Fire-i™ FireWire Digital Camera.
What is included in this package is the software, the six-foot FireWire cable as well as the product itself. The key features of this camera is a focus here in the very front. On the left hand side, we have a power connection as well as a connection here to give you the ability to—a bunch of these together. On the right hand side here, we’ve got a connection which goes directly from this camera into your computer system. Now, if your computer system has a FireWire card already, well there’s not going to be a problem. But if you do not have a FireWire card, you will have to purchase one in order to get this kind of camera to work.
On the back here, we have a really nice clip, it’s rubber there, so it is fantastic if you have a FireWire ready laptop and you want a very high quality camera on the top of your notebook or your laptop and as well this clip does swivel back and fort as well as going in and out. So, it does give you a very good movement and you could certainly place the camera direct, the camera or cameras where you wish.
The sensor time is actually a Sony WFINE ¼ inch CCD color progressive square pixels and as well as the resolution on these camera is VGA (640 x 480). As well, the optics built in as an F-stop of 4.65 millimeter lens and it has an anti-reflective coding. As well, the frames per second that this can capture is around 30 frames per second, of course you can do 15 7.5 3.5 frames per second depending upon the software of course and the settings you’re using in the software itself. And of course you have all kinds of adjustments automatic and manual, white balance for instance as well as the color saturation, of course the back lit compensation, the sharpness and of course this does come with a software sleep mode. You can actually put this thing to sleep in so many minutes.
Let me now have a look at the Fire-i software. I will be using a Shuttle SS50 computer system here and this system does come with FireWire installed onto it. So, very easily just go ahead and plug it in here and of course the other part of the cable goes plugged directly into the camera. And once that’s done of course, you will have installed the hardware part of this installation. And the next thing of course will be to do, will be to install their software.
Once you do plugged the camera in, you will be able to go into the device manager. And under imaging devices, you will see that a generic 1394 desktop camera has been installed or if there’s a yellow explanation icon there, you’ll have to right click on that and go ahead and select the correct drivers. Now, these drivers I would recommend you download directly from the internet, so you insure that you have the very latest drivers for your operating system. In my case, I am using Windows XP. So again, right click here on this generic 1932 and you go ahead and select update driver. And of course when you are updating and selecting the driver, you will want to do this manually and go into the directory which you downloaded or which you have on your CD and select the correct camera. In this case, it’s the Sony CCM-DS250.
And this is the software that is included. At the top there, you can see which camera actually is installed, the pixel format and of course the pixel format you can change, you can have—what I have selected here which is the default YUV422 of course you could go in here and select these other options as well. Below here, you have the resolution. You can select 320 x 240 or you can select 640 by 480 and of course depend upon the resolution, we’ll be very dependent upon the frame rates. For instance, if you select 320 by 240, you can go 30, 15, 7.5 or 3.7 five frames per second, or if you go 640 by 480 you can go 15, 7.5 or 3.75 for frames per second.
Also, for their down we have memory presets, of course you can save presets or load them. And the last thing here is the camera controls are probably the most important part of this software. You can go in here and tweak such things as the exposure. And in the exposure, you’ve got things like the exposure, the shutter as well as the game, as well as the iris going into the color area. Of course you got it more settings here for the color as well as a basic area to adjust the focus, the brightness, the sharpness, and the gamma in here.
Once you do you have all of the settings to your preference, you can go in here and click on the start button of course it activates the camera and anything you pointed at will come up on the screen. And you can see here that this is quite a very crystal clear display. Also, of course if you wanted full screen, you can just go ahead here and maximize it and pull it up to the full screen and again the quality of the image is quite good.
As you saw there, this product is extremely easy to install. FireWire has been around for quite sometime now. And this certainly is a very stable and proven technology. Whether you’re using this camera for your home or for your office or if you’re into webcam or just some kind of video conferencing, this will certainly do the job and do it very well. The only disadvantage with this camera I could find is of course the price. The price point on this is a little high. And of course let’s not forget, if you do not have a FireWire card in your system, you would have to go out and purchase a FireWire card. FireWire cards these days are becoming extremely affordable. You can get them for like $60.00 or $70.00 depending on of course the manufacturer of the FireWire card you are getting but overall this is a great product.
Again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and this has been another video review. Be sure to check back in a few days. I will have a brand new one for you then. Also, checkout my website at www.3dgameman.com and while you are there check out the forums. Registration in the forums is free of course and you could go in there and leave your own suggestions and comments. Until the next time, take care.
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