Squeeze the Most Out of Video

Inexpensive video Webcams make sending video clips via e-mail an enticing communication option. There's only one problem: Clips lasting just a few seconds can occupy half a megabyte or more, making sending and receiving them on a dial-up connection a real chore. And, in many cases, the recipients must have special software to decompress and display the video files, or they won't be able to see your clips. CyberTainment's $159 CyberMail AV VideoEmail System addresses those issues: It uses a proprietary 900-to-1 software compression scheme that crunches video clips to manageable size, and it lets you send the clips as executable files that anyone can play.

The CyberMail AV package includes a video camera, software, a microphone, and a PCI video capture card. Though you'll have to open up your PC to install the card, it allows the capture of video streams at a far greater bandwidth--and higher overall quality--than would be possible with a serial or Universal Serial Bus camera alone. While CyberMail AV has a few rough edges in both its native and TWAIN software interfaces, the package delivers high-quality e-mailable video.

Card Capture

Installing the CyberVideo PCI video capture card into our test PC was quick and trouble-free. The board has two RCA ports and one S-Video port, which enable you to plug in up to three external video sources--such as the packaged camera (which uses an RCA interface), a camcorder, a VCR, or even a game console--and switch among them. Unfortunately, in our tests, when we accidentally switched to a port that didn't have a device attached, we had to reboot our computer before we could switch back to the CyberMail camera.

The camera itself is manufactured for CyberTainment by Sanyo. Housed in a small, rectangular gray chassis, the camera can pivot up and down, but not sideways, which makes positioning the lens exactly where you want it difficult. The glass lens manually focuses from infinity down to less than a centimeter, and captures relatively sharp, well-exposed, totally flicker-free images. We found that the camera's white balance in its default mode is well adjusted for the fluorescent lighting often found in offices, though images quickly lose color saturation when light falls off in the background.