I bought an Apple iSight camera for my Mac Powerbook G4 this morning. I’ve wanted a web cam for a while, and finally, discovering all the cool video software on my mac pushed me over the edge.

Unpacking

As usual with Apple gear, the packaging of the iSight is superb. The plastic wrap comes off and the content box slides out of the outer cover. The main box then folds into two, with ‘Enjoy’ and ‘Designed by Apple in California’ the first things you read.

Inside the box, the iSight itself, a carrying tube and various holders and other gubbins await.

Plugging In

The iSight clips to its firewire connection, which is in turn clipped by a cool looking but slightly precarious clip to the top of the powerbook screen. After a slight pause, the iChat setup runs. I cancelled this the first time and went straight for Quartz Composer.

The video quality is damn good for webcam type hardware. 640×480 at 30 frame per second doesn’t sound that great, but the image quality is clean and smooth. I was very impressed. I’ll post some more images later.

Quartz Composer is a live video patch panel that makes it really easy to patch live video, images, clips, RSS, text through visual effects onto the screen. See the picture of me on a cube. ;-)

Isn’t that teh cool !?!?!?!?!