Bulbs & Fittings Ideas

Customer Video Review Length:: 0:24 Mins

Judge the quality for yourself!

The Bad:
Nasty color shifts especially in skintones.

The ugly:
Users who look as if they’ve been dead for a week.

The Phillips SPZ6500/27 webcam is a sexy-looking, black object, with a cylindrical lens housing sticking out of it, set atop a strong clip. There really isn’t too much more to say about it.

It will give you the ability to make Skype calls on your laptop if you couldn’t before, but there are other units that will do the same thing for less money and without making you look like something that was hatched in a cavern deep in the bowels of the earth.

Setup is simple, but then, when isn’t it? We’re in the second decade of the twenty-first century and the watchword for computer peripheral makers is a page from Apple’s playbook: if a monkey on drugs can’t do it, it goes back to the drawing board.

People have complained about the short cord, but that doesn’t really make sense. The thing is designed and built for use with laptops and it even comes with a desktop adapter. All of these things make the short cord complaint dubious: there isn’t a laptop made where a thirty-inch cord is going to make a difference. If you’re inclined or forced to use it on a desktop, the incredibly cheap USB hub on your table makes the cord issue a non-issue.

More important than the cord is the picture quality. With two megapixels, this webcam can handle high-def video and razor-sharp stills, but there is a big difference between a mechanically good picture and a picture that makes a background good and a portrait flattering. Yes, it’s clear and sharp but the color casts it throws in will make you look as if you’re auditioning for a bit part in the next season of “The Walking Dead.”

I guess you could try and play with your computer’s color controls until you regain some semblance of humanity, but you shouldn’t have to. A good photograph is magical and when it comes to `good’ photography where the Phillips SPZ6500/27 is concerned, Gandalf just was not there that day.

The fairest thing you can say about the Phillips SPZ6500/27 is that it is adequate. It won’t blow up, it won’t crush your laptop’s screen bezel or cause crop failure. It is easy-peasy to get it working and it will let you take and send all kinds of pictures if the camera on your laptop is broken or missing, but you end up wishing it had more to say for itself.

The Amazon price is good, which is a good thing you can say about it. Another is that its lens is sharp, but in the long run, you might end up wanting more.