I Spy with My Little X-Eye - But I'm Blind, I'm Blind....

Yes, I know. There are so many much more expensive technically incompetent products I could be writing about right now - in operating systems, networking products, switches, routers, you name it. So why would I nominate the PC CHIPs X-EYE PC Camera (USB 1.1) for "worst product of the year"? Perhaps because it was such a great big lie that it could ever work that even if I was given it for nothing it would still cost too much.

First, it claimed to be 100k pixel resolution (352 (h) x288 (v) max resolution, frame rate - 30 fps at CIF (352x288), color 16.8 million true color (24-bit), software - BMP/AVI/ TWAIN). All you need is a pentium (200 MHz), any Windows system / 32MB ram / 12MB disk. All for $15.99! Seems like a too good to be true deal, and it is.

Since I'm always trying to find a way for kids to get into video on the web, I actually check out these little buggers. But this one didn't deliver at all. In fact, it couldn't work because there was no way for it to send the information through the USB through a Microsoft miniport driver at the rate of speed needed to support 30 fps. We found the fastest it could go reliably was a grand four frames per second. It could do an amazing ten frames per second if you completely idled the PC (yes, that meant killing every single program).

So the X-Eye is a complete fraud. It did contain the electronics internally needed to work, but you couldn't get the video off it fast enough to capture on the PC. It was a failure of architecture, and architects know better. The economics dictated it be made dirt cheap, so to keep cheap the software had to execute flawlessly on any configuration on any PC (hardware and software). If you had a slightly slow USB connection, for example, you'd lose it, or if had other USB devices and software on them that used a bit more processor than was available, you'd lose it, and so on. Your odds of success are better in the state lottery. At least SoftRAM (another infamous fraud) didn't annoy you - it just silently didn't work.

The design assumed it could back-to-back send a scan line or more across the USB with no recovery required, the software would accept it at that rate, and the display adaptor would display it at that rate. So we are talking an expectation of perfect hardware, software, and systems architecture in play to work with a fifteen buck device. Anyone seen that in PC economics? At InterProphet, we developed methods to achieve zero packet loss. Anyone think it went into a fifteen buck device?

So caveat emptor, folks. So throw those X-Eyes away (and I don't care how many popup ads you see about them) and buy your daughter or son a Canon A60 instead.