Hello, I am David Murray, otherwise known as the 8-Bit Guy, and today I’m going to
show you the Connectix Quickcam, which came out in 1994.
This was the first ever webcam, or at least affordable mass-market webcam.
In fact, the term webcam didn’t even exist until a year or two after this thing was on
the market.
I don’t normally do unboxings on this channel, but I thought you might want to see how this
thing was packaged.
OK, well, I suspect this is not how it came from the factory, so nevermind on that.
Well, at least it came with the software disks, and the original manual.
Oh look, it came with an advertisement from tiger direct.
Oh boy, I could buy a Windows 95 keyboard for $29 and a floppy drive for $39.
Oh!
And the registration card.
I have got to fill this out and send it in!
So the camera connects to the parallel port of your PC.
There was also a Macintosh version that used the little round serial port that macs used
to have.
Anyway, the PC version required connecting to the keyboard port in order to get its 5
Volts of power.
And they gave you a passthrough so that you could connect a standard AT or PS/2 keyboard
at the other end.
This setup really makes you appreciate USB ports, which did not exist back then.
It's also important to check your BIOS and make sure the parallel port is set to bi-directional
or enhanced mode.
So, let me tell you a little about the specifications of this thing.
It can do up to 320x240 resolution, which is about .08 megapixels.
Another term that didn't exist in 1994.
It is a black and white camera that can produce up to 64 shades of gray.
However, there is a trick I used to use in order to get color pictures from this thing,
which I'll show you later.
The ball itself sits on this little triangular base so that you move it around and point
it at things.
I think most people would sit this on top of their big and bulky CRT monitors.
It also had a tripod mount on the bottom so you could mount this thing on a tripod, which
I always thought was a cool feature and often made use of it.
Let's install the software here on this Windows 95 computer.
Since it only requires the one floppy disk, installation is less than a minute.
You get two different programs: QuickPict, which is for creating still photos and QuickMovie
which is for creating little movie clips.
One of the big challenges of this camera was simply to get the controls adjusted enough
for a clear picture.
The dynamic range on this thing was very, very small and so even slightly moving the
camera often meant fiddling with the controls again just to get a decent image.
Combine this with the terrible framerate and making movies with this thing was really an
exercise in futility.
So, uh, most of what I used it for was just taking still photos.
So I'm going to show you some of the photos I took back around 1995 and 96.
This was my first digital camera of any sort and I ended up taking a lot of photos with
it because my only other option was a film camera, which required buying film and taking
it to be processed, and then waiting several days to receive the result.
As such, I have a lot of valuable photos I took with this thing that would have otherwise
never existed, such as these photos of me and my Wife as newlyweds.
And, that's something I've tried to explain to people early on in the days of digital
cameras.
Even when the quality wasn't as good as film, is that the convenience meant that I was end
up taking lots of photos that would otherwise just never exist.
And that's something we take for granted today when everyone has a high quality camera built
into their phone.
Occasionally, I would even connect the camera to my laptop and carry it around with me to
take photos and videos outside.
OK, so I promised to show you how to take color photos with a black and white camera.
Well, I actually got the idea from a magazine I had read back in the late 1980s where they
used an Amiga combined with a black and white CCTV camera and I remember reading how they
got color photos out of it by using 3 different color filters, red, green, blue, and taking
3 different images and combining them together.
So I got the idea to try this on my quickcam.
So I grabbed some filters at my local camera store and tried it out myself.
And to show you how this works, I'll use my Tux penguin, my common cold virus, and the
stomach ache bacteria for a test shot.
So, I pointed the camera at them and then hold the red color filter in front of the
camera and take a photo.
Then I use the green filter, and eventually the blue filter.
Now I have 3 black and white photos representing the red, green, and blue values and I can
merge them together in software and voila!
A color photo!
Here's another example from my wall of keyboards.
OK, so I'll try an outdoor photo looking out the window.
Now the problem with this is that the trees are blowing slightly in the wind.
And that's a big downside to doing this is that nothing can move in the photo.
Anyway, it did work, theres a little weird color patterns due to the tree, but not too
bad.
Here are some color photos I made back in 1995 using the same trick.
I even managed to take one of my wife, but she had to hold very still for about 30 seconds
while I took it, which sort of goes back to the photography from the 1800's when nobody
smiled in photos because exposure times were so long.
So one more thing I wanted to mention about this thing, is that believe it or not, inside
the ball, about the only thing really in there is the CCD sensor and this actually sends
an analog signal over the cable.
and all of the actual brains and electronics are actually inside the little parallel port
connector.
So they did eventually end up coming out with a color version of this camera, which I've
never had but I would love to get my hands on it, just to see.
you know, what it looked like.
Now, Logitech bought out Connectix a few years later and rebranded all of the quickcams under
the Logitech brand name.
Now, I did end up buying the first Logitech USB quickcam, which was color.
Now it did have color and better resolution, but it still wasn't all that great of a picture.
Now I'll show you a few examples that I took from it.
They still look terrible by today's standards.
Also, for anyone who wanted to know, I actually used an old copy of PaintShop Pro back in
the 1990s in order to combine my color pictures.
But you can actually do the same thing with most modern paint programs, even like the
Gimp will do it.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I've got some more great stuff coming up,
so I'll see you next time!