Recently I accompanied a family member to a local Office Depot store where I came upon a couple of web cameras that were in a clearance bin marked $4. I remembered my sibling wanted a netcam but didn’t want to spend the same amount as a $5 dollar footlong, so I pointed the webcams out to him. He didn’t look convinced they were any good until I pointed out that (a) they’re $4 and (b) he could spend $6-7 in gas to return them and get his $4 back.

So he quickly snatched up two.

After we got home, before he even tried one out I researched the netcam. It was a Markvision Magnetic Webcam model #MVWC-MG4933-L. Seems a lot of people bought these for $9.99 on Black Friday. There were a ton of complaining on the Net that the drivers on the disc weren’t the right ones. After looking at more sites, some people said their Windows 7 and Vista eventually found the drivers on their own, they just had to wait a minute or two.

It was this point that my better deal than a $5 footlong sibling informed me the driver didn’t work on the webcam. I let him know to wait a minute or two and then did a little more research as I plugged one in my Win 7 computer. It found the camera after a little bit and said it was an Altair Vimicro USB Camera.

I haven’t found more on this webcam but if you’re looking for drivers for it and have Win7 or Vista it should install automatically. The drivers information in Device Manager for Win7 is:

ksthunk.sys
usbvideo.sys

Altair USB2.0 Camera
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Date: 6/21/2006
Driver Version: 6.1.7600.16385

This info doesn’t do me any good, but it might help someone else getting it to run. Since his Vista and my Win 7 rig said it sees it, now was the time to test it out.

Well, how do you test out a new webcam?

You can use instant messenger programs like AIM and Yahoo (but I loathe IMing). You can use any video capture programs (if you have them installed), or you can head out to a very cool web page - Testmycam.com designed just for that purpose.

Testmycam allows anyone with a browser using flash to test out their webcam. All you have to do is head on over to the page and click the allow button to give the flash application permission to access your webcam and microphone and BAM! you see what your camera sees. As well as a nifty green and black window that apparently shows you the camera working out what’s changing on the screen.

Testmycam is a very happy discovery and I’m very glad to have found it. It’s a great and easy way to check out if your webcam is working and is very worthy site to add to your bookmarks. It does one thing and does it very well.

See, you never know what you might find until you go looking for it. If you have a webcam, try that site out. Testmycam rules!

Oh and as for the $4 webcams - yeah they work and all but I’d rather have a $5 footlong!

PS. If you have one of these Markvision webcams and can’t figure out how to turn the lights off, it’s the slider that looks like a volume control on the cable. Weird.