Recently we bought the Creative Live! Cam Video IM Pro because I wanted something for Windows that fit comfortably on top of my LCD monitor, included face tracking and could be motion activated. My thinking was this would be useful for videoconferencing. I chose the IM Pro camera which seemed very reasonable at $30 USD — and the last one on the shelf — at Best Buy.

The first thing that surprised me when opening up the package was that it actually came with some (not all) useful software. Most lowend purchases they think it’s time to upsell you into uncrippled pro versions of software you’ll never use. The IM Pro included the following software:

- Creative Live Cam Manager with FX including a dozen plus different backgrounds (see example of card background below), also manage: photo capture, video recording, time lapse, motion detection and remote monitoring
- Muvee Auto Producer 2.1. You can combine clips, add titling and make a movie very similar to Windows Media Maker.
- Orb 2.0 secure. This version uses too much AJAX for my liking and seems like more of a downgrade than from what I’ve seen so far, but the general idea is that you can placeshift your audio, TV, video and even your camera from another computer similar to how Slingbox works. Just watch out for the anonymous aggregated stats stuff here.
- Creative Photo Calendar and Photo Manager. Nothing to see here, move along. The kind of stuff that most people never use.
- Creative Software Autoupdate. Handy program that keeps up with the newest drivers and Creative program updates you are using. Since we have a Creative Sound Blaster sound card it found a newer driver automatically and let me choose when to install. You can make all parts of the upgrade process automatic but I’d recommend just having it download the newest updates and alert you that they are ready.

Decent selection from a bundled software perspective. You used to have to pay well over $100 to find a web camera that does everything the IM Pro does and at even worse quality. And what about the webcam itself? How is the quality? Is it $30 cheap?

It would be cool if you could (easily) make your own FX backgrounds. I’ll have to do some more digging around to see about that. Or of course if somebody knows the answer, feel free to use the comments below and share.

What do you think? The quality seems OK for video conferencing, 1.3 Megapixel quality photos and video chat up to 800×600 resolution, but regular video bloggers (vloggers) will probably seek something with better quality.

You can record in WMV and AVI format use a wide variety of codecs. Freak your friends with some of the special effects like the wavy mirror which splits your face into two or start your face on fire; more exciting than animated smilies, although I’m sure the novelty wears off.

I’m not sure how much videoconferencing I’ll actually be doing going forward, but the price was right and the quality passes for the intended use. Looking around online, I’m seeing prices for the Creative Live! IM Pro as high as $87. It’s definitely not worth that much, but if you can find it for $30 like we did, it’s worth digging into the wallet or purse. Grade: C+

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