QuickCam Pro 9000

The Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 is a delightful, high quality and relatively inexpensive webcam for online chats and creating basic YouTube videos. It's about the size of an average mobile phone and connects to your PC using USB 2.0. However, it's not your average webcam; in fact, it's far from ordinary.

If you've ever wanted to be a cat or a velociraptor but have intelligently accepted the laws of nature and science then the next best thing is to impersonate one using the wonders of technology. What are we on about? Avatars of course! The QuickCam Pro 9000 comes with a selection of 30 motion-sensing avatars, face accessories, fun filters and video masks, as well as countless more downloadable for free from the Logitech website. This very intelligent little piece of bundled software induced many a genuine "LOL" on Windows Live Messenger when we tested it.

Installation was a breeze, but it did take a little while. It took us about 15min open the box, install the software and run through the step-by-step process customising the speaker and microphone settings. This was essential in order to get optimal performance for Internet calling applications and other programs. Unfortunately, the QuickCam Pro 9000 only runs on Windows, thus Mac users miss out on all the fun it has to offer.

Sporting a 2-megapixel sensor and a Carl Zeiss autofocus lens, this webcam has great image quality. Colours were displayed accurately and focusing on a moving subject, e.g. a person walking like an Egyptian, at 30 frames per second was no problem for the QuickCam Pro 9000.

At times there was the annoying jerkiness or lag you would expect from a webcam, but we put that behaviour down to running multiple programs while the video was streaming, as well as a congested Internet pipe. Of course, a modern computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU will have no problems running this webcam, and your online experience will be much smoother if you have a fast Internet connection.

Costing just $149.95, the QuickCam Pro 9000 proved to be a lot of fun and it's well recommended if you want to have some fun while chatting to your mates online.