Sony PlayStation Eye Camera (Bulk Packaging)

You buy it, you get the software (CL-eye), and you work it.-physical-This thing weighs quite a bit. It dropped off my monitor and it made a preeeeety big thud. The webcam still works though. Cable is maybe too long for desktop usage, and WAY too long for laptop usage. Mine had a ferrite clamp on it. The bottom of the product is some kind of felt-ish material. Provides better grip than bare plastic.-technology-The camera itself is very high framerate. With the CL-Eye drivers, you can boost it above 120 frames per second. However, basic photography notes that with higher shutter speed, the image gets darker. So don't go trying to film 120fps shots at night.The mic. Its advertised as beam-forming/directional; The mics themselves cannot form a noise-cancellation map, the software is supposed to. Since this was never actually supposed to work with anything other than a PS3, then there is none. And plus, the mics sound like butt anyway. Since there are 4 mics, then are 4 pickups. If you sit the camera on a desk that is shaking from bass, any program listening in on the quad-mic is going to suffer clipping. Everything will sound like its in a castle, echoing from the massive concrete walls. My friends said I sounded like a king though, so that was cool.-notes-If you want to use multiple Playstation Eye cameras for the PC, you'll need to get CL-Eye's special software to support multiple cameras. The free version is only one supported. This will only matter to a small amount of people. Most of that small party will probably be doing 3D motion capture for rigs.

I don't even own a PS3. This camera is strongly recommended for use with Free Track on a PC and for that it is working well. Set-up was easy and it does what it is supposed to do as far as Free-Track goes. I did not remove the IR filter and I don't know if the one I got is the easy or hard one to remove. I am using a piece of un-exposed, developed camera film with both sides covered in black magic marker as an IR bandpass filter. This is working reasonably well. The room I am using it in has windows from both sides and behind me so the light conditions are constanly changing during the day. This means I have had to adjust the settings as the light in the room changes. I am using a 3 point clip with wide angle IR LEDs. I am going to try running a little higher current to the LEDs to see if that will help with the ambient light conditions. But for now closing the curtains works good too. Of course if your not running Free-Track then none of this means anything to you.

It is amazing how old this camera is and yet how awesome the quality is. It IS only 640x480 resolution BUT the FPS is incredibly high, well over 120 i believe. This enables you to use it for all kinds of projects, such as head tracking, 3D scanning, etc. It also has a great wide-array mic and if you are after microphone,= for Cortana or Alexa on PC, this works perfectly also, and performs as good as $50+ mics. One thing to note.. it is NOT Plug and Play.. this is for the PS3 not PC, but quite a few driver packs are available, CM is the most popular but costs, others are free keep that in mind.

Disclaimer: This review is targeted primarily at people who are considering this as a cheap PC webcam solution. If you're buying this for use on a PS3 I imagine it'll work as intended, and the numerous reviews you can find online in regards to its functionality and usefulness in PS3 games that support it would be more informative than my review.I bought this a while ago as a cheap way to get a webcam feed into my occasional Twitch broadcasts. A bit grainy, especially when the lighting is dimmer than it can handle, but it worked well enough for a small, high frame rate face cam feed in the corner of my broadcasts. It was an acceptable solution...while it lasted, at any rate. It would probably also be useful for a DIY head tracking setup.There is one large caveat, though: unless Microsoft decides to fix it, this won't work with newer builds of Windows 10. The unofficial windows driver (which hasn't been updated in years and probably won't be any time soon) was designed for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 and also initially worked with Windows 10...until Microsoft released an update that broke it along with other older webcams. Unless you've done your research and can confirm that the problem has been fixed (as far as I know, it hasn't as of writing this), do not buy this if you're running Windows 10.