Webcams are now standard on a significant proportion of the laptops available on the market. But what do you do if you have an older laptop or have just purchased one without a Webcam? The answer of course is to invest in a standalone webcam.

We have had two new recent additions to the growing family of laptops that cohabit our house. Both of these came equipped with a webcam. Sadly we also had one of the older generation pass away, but I guess that is the circle of laptop life. OK, so now I am at risk of sounding like I’ve escaped from a Disney cartoon, but it has been quite interesting to look at the evolution of this family over the last few years. The old laptop that finally passed on, had a CD drive, two PCMCIA card sockets and only a solitary USB socket. The latest addition has a DVD RW drive, four USB drives, a media card reader, a webcam and significantly more processing power and memory. I would guess there is about 7 year age gap between them and USB has become the connection interface of choice.

But I digress, as a family we have never really used webcams. VoIP applications like Skype might have pushed us that way, but the use of Skype in the U.A.E is not really that reliable. However having them available on the new laptops have prompted a surge in use, so much so that we are now looking at equipping our older laptops with one. I have investigated whats available and have found a few that interest me, the pick of the bunch is probably Microsoft’s LifeCam NX-6000 which is small, light and has a good image resolution for a webcam.

Do you have a webcam to recommend?