From Houston to Toronto…via iSight
Last week, my wife made a trip to Toronto for a conference. She had been dropping hints for at least a month that she thought we might want to look into getting a couple of iSight’s for video chatting while she was gone. We’ve both been interested in exploring that, but I didn’t spring for it because money’s been tight lately and it didn’t make sense to buy just one. Secondly, it wasn’t clear to us whether the hotel she was staying in had broadband Internet coverage.
Once she got there, she found they did support broadband at a pretty standard $10/day, though they did make a little over the top profit by not supplying Ethernet cables for hooking up and charging $10 to sell you one. In any case, she asked me to get an iSight, Apple’s new little video chat camera. I bought one the next day at CompUSA for the standard U.S. price of $149.99.
If you haven’t seen an iSight, it’s shaped like a little cylinder and uses a “metal mesh” design for its skin akin Apple’s G5. As all things Apple, it is sold in an elegantly designed black box that opens outward from its middle to display white plastic trays holding the camera and three plastic clips. While the clips are built to cover Apple’s iMacs, eMacs, Cinema Displays, iBooks, and PowerBooks, the only clip that just clips on is the one for the notebooks. The others have a circular base covered with adhesive (and protected from sticking to unintended objects by a waxed paper bottom) that you’re supposed to stick on the display somewhere. (A more elegant solution can be found using MacMice’s iSight Clips.) To get the correct perspective, I installed the iSight into its tallest clip, one that will stand on the desktop by itself, and set the pedestal on top of a rather flat, upside down flashlight positioned in the center of a 17 inch Apple Studio LCD. I hooked the camera up to my Dual 1 Ghz G4 PowerMac; my wife had only a 700Mhz G3 iBook on her end. Both computers were running Panther, Mac OS 10.3.
On the first evening, we hooked up using iChatAV and its “one way video chat” feature. I could hear her clearly without any clipping or dropouts, and she could both hear and see me without any problems. Connecting up was very easy, and the experience was so pleasant I asked her to see if there was an Apple retailer where she was where she could get an iSight. Searching the web, I found one for her named “Computer Service Centre” that was about a mile from her hotel. She traveled there the next day and bought an iSight there at the slightly elevated price of $165 U.S. We tried hooking up that evening, but the second night did not go so smoothly. It took us about an hour of fiddling with it to get any audio flowing across both sides, apparently due to some kind of loose connection on her end. Once we did, it worked pretty well, with slight audio drop outs on my wife’s end I suspect were due to her little G3’s struggles to keep up. Still, I’ve tried video chatting before; and iSight is the first thing I’ve used that not only does a good job but was easy to set up and relatively inexpensive. If either of us were going to travel a lot, we’d want at least a 1Ghz G4 notebook to run iSight well.
Now that she’s home, I’d like to set the cameras up using her 800 Mhz G4 iMac and my 700 Mhz G4 iMac and see how they do. We can run them across our home network using Rendezvous. The only problem now is being too accessible…
Once she got there, she found they did support broadband at a pretty standard $10/day, though they did make a little over the top profit by not supplying Ethernet cables for hooking up and charging $10 to sell you one. In any case, she asked me to get an iSight, Apple’s new little video chat camera. I bought one the next day at CompUSA for the standard U.S. price of $149.99.
If you haven’t seen an iSight, it’s shaped like a little cylinder and uses a “metal mesh” design for its skin akin Apple’s G5. As all things Apple, it is sold in an elegantly designed black box that opens outward from its middle to display white plastic trays holding the camera and three plastic clips. While the clips are built to cover Apple’s iMacs, eMacs, Cinema Displays, iBooks, and PowerBooks, the only clip that just clips on is the one for the notebooks. The others have a circular base covered with adhesive (and protected from sticking to unintended objects by a waxed paper bottom) that you’re supposed to stick on the display somewhere. (A more elegant solution can be found using MacMice’s iSight Clips.) To get the correct perspective, I installed the iSight into its tallest clip, one that will stand on the desktop by itself, and set the pedestal on top of a rather flat, upside down flashlight positioned in the center of a 17 inch Apple Studio LCD. I hooked the camera up to my Dual 1 Ghz G4 PowerMac; my wife had only a 700Mhz G3 iBook on her end. Both computers were running Panther, Mac OS 10.3.
On the first evening, we hooked up using iChatAV and its “one way video chat” feature. I could hear her clearly without any clipping or dropouts, and she could both hear and see me without any problems. Connecting up was very easy, and the experience was so pleasant I asked her to see if there was an Apple retailer where she was where she could get an iSight. Searching the web, I found one for her named “Computer Service Centre” that was about a mile from her hotel. She traveled there the next day and bought an iSight there at the slightly elevated price of $165 U.S. We tried hooking up that evening, but the second night did not go so smoothly. It took us about an hour of fiddling with it to get any audio flowing across both sides, apparently due to some kind of loose connection on her end. Once we did, it worked pretty well, with slight audio drop outs on my wife’s end I suspect were due to her little G3’s struggles to keep up. Still, I’ve tried video chatting before; and iSight is the first thing I’ve used that not only does a good job but was easy to set up and relatively inexpensive. If either of us were going to travel a lot, we’d want at least a 1Ghz G4 notebook to run iSight well.
Now that she’s home, I’d like to set the cameras up using her 800 Mhz G4 iMac and my 700 Mhz G4 iMac and see how they do. We can run them across our home network using Rendezvous. The only problem now is being too accessible…
posted by Andy Foster at
9:01 AM
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