Web Cameras

[Todo]

Okay, I need some advice. I have a friend who is wanting to setup web conferencing, so he wants a very good quality web camera for his real estate business. He said he bought some 1.3 mexapixel cameras at Best Buy. They were around $100, but the audio and video is sometimes choppy. This is on a T1 connection. Can anyone suggest a high quality web camera that can accomodate his business?

[NooNoo]

This is all about the bandwidth baby!
A full T1 is 1.544mbps - presumably shared with the entire office...considering your adsl download is around 8mbs, then a T1 is pretty slow... except that a T1 is the same speed up as down so uploading it is between 1.5 and 6 times as fast as domestic adsl.

If it's choppy then it can only be about transmission rate. Your standard webcam is half that resolution. Do some maths about how big a single frame of 1.3mp actually is and then multiply that by the number of frames per second being sent and take that away from 1.544/8 (to get megabytes)

When it's choppy, see if someone else is using the bandwidth if it is intermittent choppiness that is the problem.

The higher the quality, the more bandwidth that is needed. A quick experiment would be to turn down the resolution to vga (640x480) and see if it runs better.