I mentioned in my Getting started with Skype for patients post that I was going to go out on Black Friday to see if I could find a couple of inexpensive webcams that I could lend out for patients to try. I wanting to make sure that if a webcam never came back, I wouldn’t be too annoyed.
At Best Buy, I found a really nice deal on a Logitech C250 webcam for $19.99 (I noticed that it is back up to $29.99 today), so I bought two of them.
They don’t have the face-tracking feature that I like , but I plugged one in and it looks like it will do nicely for a trial run. My plan is to ask the patient to buy a better one if they want to do telepsychiatry, but at least having a couple to lend out makes it possible for someone to see if telepsychiatry is going to work for them.
The only problem that I can anticipate having is that most people use Windows, and I need to remember to tell the people who have used the loaner webcam to make sure they uninstall the loaner webcam software first, before they put on the software for the webcam they buy.
I’ll post again when I have some more experience with this webcam.
{ 4 } Comments
Hi Patrick, could I ask what webcam you use for your side of the video?
In our research, the Logitech Quickcam 9000 Pro is well regarded. It can be bought for about $70-$80. I can understand why you’d rather not loan those out to patients.
To get the highest quality video of them, one thought is to ask for an at-cost deposit, then return the deposit if the patient returns the webcam.
I just read in an older article that you went with the Logitech C905. The addition of a stand does seem useful.
I hope my string of comments are not intrusive. I am catching up on this blog and enjoy reading your thoughts.
Actually, I have two Logitech webcams. I prefer the QuickCam Pro for notebooks even for my desktop, because of the trick to get the appearance of good eye contact that I talk about in that post.
Thanks for the nice comments. No problem about reading posts out of order. I do the same with other people’s blogs.
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