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.