I’ve had some fun with webcams during the last 2 weeks.

I purchased a ultra cheap webcam from china (via ebay), and got it running (the original driver on the CD didn’t work correctly, but the latest driver from the net did the trick).

Its supposed to be an “infrared” webcam, but its just a normal webcam with white LEDs.

The problem seems to be that at low light levels, the exposure time is so high, that you get something like 2 – 5 blurred images per second. Not good as a surveillance camera.

And the surveillance software make it even worse (it has a “capture when motion is detected” mode, but it only seems to start recoding 2 seconds after the “motion”).

Anyway, I’m investigating some other software which might do a better job.