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What is the best camera for vvvv?

There is no simple best. Depending on your needs there would be many options:

Speed

the problem with usb-webcams seems to be that they are slow. even slower are dv-cams connected via firewire. analog video capture cards are quite fast. but the fastest option you have is uncompressed firewire. have a look in the Video Hardware Links section for a listing of capture cards and cameras.

Image quality

if speed is not important image quality could be a reason to choose the camera. are you sure the 640x480 of the toucam are native pixels? isn't it that they are actually only 320x240 scaled? that would be of no use then. analog video usually has that noise in dark imageareas. so take dv-cams for quality.

Price

USB webcams are very cheap.

Brightness

Doing analysis in a dark space is really difficult. If you're not using some form of night-vision camera you'll probably need to adjust the image to get good results -- and while you can do that in software it's much better if you have a capture card or camera that lets you change brightness/contrast/gamma levels in the driver.
A straight DVCam Firewire connection won't let you do that, but more specialized webcams and analog grabber cards will. – kms

Driver Quality

I made very good experiences with the Osprey100 or Osprey2xx from viewcast).
Many "consumer cards" like Hauppauge WinTV or Terratec ... need the applications that come with the cards to change some of their settings.

When using cheap consumer cards with booktree/connexant chips I made very good experiences using the universal Bt848 / Bt849 / Bt878 & Bt879 driver available at http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ instead of the original driver supplied with the card.
This driver is very stable, fast and does not need the manufacturers extra applications.

• MSBERGER

Infrared reception

To be more or less independent from the ambient lighting (or darkness), it might be an idea to use a IR-sensitive camera, perhaps with an IR-Filter (blocks all light except from IR-light) and perhaps lighting the scene with some IR-lights. Good sources arehttp://www.videortechnical.com andhttp://www.theimagingsource.com