Camera is good, works as described. Needs better lens. Lots of barrel distortion.

I bought this because it was one of the only webcams without a microphone that I could find. This webcam has a compact & simple design, no third-party software, no crappy microphone that you'd disable anyways, and is ready within half a minute of plugging it in to a USB port. This is exactly what I was looking for in a webcam.

Great camera for the price, hard to believe the quality of the image for the price. With a little tinkering it's possible to change the lens for a little zoom.

I am using these cameras in both video and (still) picture captures. Very smooth video. Adjusts well to low light conditions and presents
clear and detailed still pictures. I plugged them in, loaded driver and viewing software (not in the box but easily available) and was up and
running on Windows 8.1. I like them enough to plan on buying more. Buyer support is very impressive and responsive.

I bought this to use on my Ubuntu Linux system that is configured with the Motion DVR security program. Note that this camera does NOT come with a mount so I made a little mount by welding a nut on to a steel angle and putting a screw through this along with a plastic camera nut I had in my junk drawer. It is a standard threaded camera mount, you can buy security camera mounts on Amazon. The camera is NOT waterproof. On the left picture you can see the camera mounted to my garage window. In the middle you can see a picture of the back yard and on the right is the same picture after fisheye correction using the free Gimp program under Windows in conjunction with the MathMap image processing filter. (which is also free) Load Gimp, install MathMap, load the picture, then Filters, Distorts, Lens Distortion, click Preview, and move the Main slider to the left and the Edge slider to the right, then export the picture. The fisheye allows for me to capture an entire view of the backyard with the single camera.

I bought this camera from the Amazon "used/returns" system for 50% off. When the camera came it did not fully power up. I fixed this by unplugging the in-line plug in the camera cord and plugging it back in. (there is a separate connect/disconnect in the cord about a foot from the camera itself) That apparently removed a bit of oxidization on the connector contacts and corrected the problem. The camera does have a little rubber lens cap on it to prevent damage during shipping. The camera lens does stick out a bit from the box, several of the Amazon pictures are incorrect.

The max resolution of this camera is 2592x1944 at 15fps using MJPG and 3 fps using YUYV. The max fps is 30. It will go to 1280x1024 at 30fps in MJPG and 800x600 at 30fps in YUYV

Several other caveats with this and other high resolution USB 2.0 cameras in this application:
a) You can only put 1 of these per USB host controller otherwise Motion issues a "resources in use" error message. Use the command "usb-devices" under Linux and move the camera from USB port to USB port until you have it on a different controller than any other high speed USB cameras
b) Decompressing MJPG streams from multiple USB cameras under Motion will max your computer's CPU and cause white streaks to appear in the picture. I have success running this camera on YUYV and another high speed USB camera plugged into the same PC under MJPG
c) The camera has auto-focus so if it is behind a window like mine is you need to make sure the window glass is perfectly clean or the camera will focus on dirt on the windows glass and not the image. It is also possible to shut off the autofocus and manually input the focus adjustment, I had to do that in order to prevent the camera from changing focus during the day and triggering the motion detection.
d) If autoexposure is shut off the camera exposure can be raised to 5000. However, while this may be OK to take a picture of the night sky it's useless for nighttime security motion detection work. This camera does not have an IR emitter and cameras behind window glass do not generally work using IR due to IR bounce off the glass.

In summary this is a fantastic value for the money (even more so since I got mine as a return). But, this camera is intended for the serious hobbyist, there is no software whatsoever in the box. If all you want to do is use it to take some interior pictures you can download a trial version of YouCam from cyberlink dot com and let it revert to Youcam Express and this camera will work with that.