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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, June 27, 2003

iSight arrives
After a miserable two straight weeks on the road, I arrived home tonight and found my iSight waiting for me. It looks pretty slick and, as expected, works quite well with the iChat AV beta. However, Apple gets points off for complexity: The box includes three different mounts, one for iMacs and flat-panel displays, one for PowerBooks and iBooks, and one for the eMac, a tube for traveling with the iSight, two weird little clips through which you must wind the (admittedly ultra-thin) FireWire cable before it will attach to a mount, and the camera and the cable. That's a lot of crap to manage, especially if you want to move the camera between two or more Macs. More egregiously, the iMac mount actually has a sticky surface, and sticks right to the back of the screen, instead of clipping to the top as I'd imagined (and as it works with notebooks, using a different clip). Yuck. If you do choose to move the camera between two or more machines, you need to detach the camera, detatch the cable from the mount, detach the cable from the weird little cable adapter, snake the Firewire cable out of the mount, put all the stuff in some sort of bag, and so on. Then reverse the process on the other end. It's just not elegant. I will grab another one for the iBook, however, and test full-screen video chat over broadband the next time I'm on the road: This should be a cool way to say Hi to the wife and kids when I'm traveling. Given all the extraneous doo-dads you need to manage, and the complexity of moving this thing around, I have to slightly adjust my grade, to B+/A-. The video and audio quality appears to be superb but, again, I need to test it more with other people before I can say for sure.

[ Posted at 10:43 PM | Permalink ]