It146;s a Snap!

HAVE buttons, will press. I have always been seduced by gadgets with plenty of knobs and buttons. Who isn8217;t? Washing machine manufacturers rely on the fact that you love all those dials and knobs. Never mind if you finally settle down for just one kind of wash cycle. But before you buy, you want to make sure that there are plenty of ways to tweak your investment. MD player, keyboard, toaster, even kitchen-scale manufacturers know that the value of the device magically improves with a couple of useless buttons and LCD displays thrown in.

But there8217;s one device that has very few visible buttons 8212; the Webcam. The one staring at me right now, from my computer, is from Logitech. It is slightly smaller than a mouse, attached to the monitor with a small piece of 3M double-sided tape and has precisely one button and one dial on it. Although I am not too sure how much I paid for it, chances are it didn8217;t cost me more than Rs 3,000. It came with an installation CD and took all of 15 minutes to get running. No fuss, no muss.

The truth is that there are plenty of buttons to the camera. Once the software is loaded, it can function as a still camera, aim and shoot and then edit at leisure and create a photo album locally or on the net. As a cam it can create instant video mail capturing audio as well and update a web page automatically. Once it begins to function as a live Webcam, you can even set up a motion detector, so that your web page updates only when there is fresh content.

But what most people will love about the Webcam is the fact that you can monitor the quality, exposure, contrast, saturation, brightness, white balance and even boost colour by using a simple slider on the monitor. Webcams are great fun to play around with as well as being practical tools. There are several cheap versions available in the market and it won8217;t do you any harm to experiment with one. Try using it with your Yahoo Instant Messenger and add zing to your communication.

The author is Station Director, Radio City, 91 FM, Bangalore