Lifeview's FlyCAM-CF
C o m p a c t F l a s h - C a m e r a - C a r d
review by RoniXt, - a.k.a. R K, - r o n i x t @ n e t z e r o . n e t

I will be updating this review pretty frequently for the next few days as I try to answer questions and make the review a bit more descriptive. Please feel free to send a message to the e-mail address above if you have any questions.

Pocket PCs are known for being mobile packets of power. People can now use Pocket PCs to show pictures, listen to music, and watch videos, all while on the road. Such things were inconceivable ten years ago, but now it looks like our farthest techno-fantasies have come to reality.

These days convergent devices have become the fantasy that most people have been dreaming of, and although the FlyCAM-CF by Lifeview doesn't make the dream come true it brings the fantasy one step closer to reality.

Before we begin the review, here are the specifications for the camera.

These details were taken from the manufacturer's website at http://www.lifeview.com.tw/eng/pro_ia_cam_cf.html#spec.

When I first received the camera, I was surprised that it came in a nice looking flashy box. I don't remember hearing that any retailers carry the camera so I would have guessed that the box would have been the plain brown cardboard variety, but good box design adds a touch of professionalism that's not half bad in my book.

Inside the box I found the FlyCAM-CF itself snuggly encapsulated in plastic, along with an instruction manual, drivers CD, and a piece of warranty documentation.

The Hardware

In terms of size and shape, the FlyCAM-CF is what you'd expect from a CompactFlash camera. It uses the CompactFlash Type I standard, so it will fit into any Pocket PC that can support CompactFlash Type I Cards. It does extend out of the CF slot though, so it won't work on any Pocket PC that has trouble supporting extended CF cards such as modems and network interface cards.

The lens can swivel a full 180 degrees so you can use it for video conferencing as well as self-portraits. You can also adjust the focus by twisting the lens to one direction or another. One thing unique about this camera is the integrated viewfinder, which keeps you from relying solely on the Pocket PC's LCD when taking pictures.

Another unique characteristic of the FlyCAM is the lens which is positioned into portrait mode. This means that if pictures will default to a 480 x 640 resolution, but it's possible to make the software automatically rotate the pictures into landscape mode as you take them.

Besides the Power LED, there are no other external buttons or features on this camera. This means that you will have to use a hardware button on your Pocket PC, or the on-screen capture button of the software to take pictures.
This wasn't too big of a disadvantage to me since I felt that using a hardware button was probably easier than trying to reach for a button on the camera.

The pictures taken in daylight are pretty decent for this type of camera. By the picture above, you can tell that a lot of the subtle details have been preserved, although you'll also notice that a lot of the colors look over-saturated. This is actually more of a solution to the first problem I encountered with this camera.

When I took the FlyCAM-CF for a first spin, I noticed that most of the pictures came out looking dark and fuzzy. Initially I was very shocked and disappointed at the quality of the images, and thought the camera was just a bad product. In desperation, I went through the software settings in an attempt to adjust the camera to the point where the pictures would look decent. I found a page where I could adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue but I had to tinker with this for a while until I could find the best settings for churning out good-looking images. I don't know whether you can tweak the settings to make it any better, but I'm pretty pleased at what I've been able to achieve so far.

One thing that I want to clearly point out is that this camera is not perfect. From the image above, you can see subtle lines running across the picture which produces a noise effect. The camera also tends to incorrectly reproduce certain colors in rare situations. Luckily these are the only bad qualities I noticed for taking pictures in outdoor and daytime lighting.

Though daylight pictures are pretty decent, taking pictures in poor lighting conditions should be avoided in my opinion. The camera lacks a flash and outputs dark and fuzzy pictures that are reminiscent of watching TV with bad reception.

On a positive note, the battery drain of this camera was pretty good. I took many pictures in a row for about an hour and the battery was still able to stay a little above 50%, but the battery did drain faster when I took video footage.

The Software

To benefit from updated drivers and software, I decided to skip the drivers CD and headed straight to the Internet to download the latest drivers and software. Everything was a simple piece of cake to install, which gave me high expectations on the software.

Besides the camera driver itself, the FlyCAM-CF also comes with a software suite from IA Style. This software bundle includes IA Album, IA Capture, and IA VideoMail.
I decided to save space and time by skipping the installation for the IA Album software since I already have software that I use to view pictures. I've seen many reviews of IA Album around on the Internet; so inquisitive minds can do a small bit of searching in case there is still an interest in this software.

IA Capture

My guess is that IA Capture is the program that most people will be using frequently with this camera. The interface looks pretty intuitive, but people who prefer extra storage space as opposed to flashy UI might not be to thrilled with it. Holding the stylus over a button or icon will bring out a small tool-tip so you can get better acquainted with the buttons.

I think most of the buttons and options in this software are somewhat self-explanatory. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, I'll let them do the talking for a while.

The General tab gives you a choice of capturing pictures at either 640 x 480, or 320 x 240. You can also choose to preview your shots in black & white, and change your preview resolution to 160 x 120 here. The "Pixel Format" option let's you choose between a YUV or RGB format.

All the other options are pretty easy to figure out. Pictures taken at the highest quality JPEG setting (SuperFine) will usually be 70 - 90KB in size and take 3 - 5 seconds to save. Pictures can be saved to storage cards as well as main memory. Because the program saves videos in a proprietary IAV format, I found that I usually used IA VideoMail for taking my videos.

IA VideoMail

The interface for IA VideoMail is also fairly simple. This is your main application for taking videos.

The Record tab allows you to change the sound quality and frame rate of your videos. Sound ranges all the way from 11 KHz to 44.1 KHz. Your choice of framerate is limited by whether you select "Save after recording is finished." or "Save and record simultaneously." The first option, limited to 30 fps, buffers your video to program memory until it runs out. The second option, limited to 15 fps, saves the video to storage memory while the video is still recording. There is no way to save the video to a storage card while saving simultaneously though.

You'll have to use your judgment to pick a good frame rate here, as picking 30 fps doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get 30 fps while recording. Picking that option will only tell the software to attempt recording at that frame rate. I've generally found that 24 fps works well at 160 x 120, and 15 fps works well at 180 x 135.

Selecting "Save and record simultaneously." will require you to lower the frame rate to 10 fps in order to get a decent recording. The positive benefit of the option however, is that it lets you record for longer time periods because it uses the storage memory portion of your RAM rather than the program memory portion. In contrast, the "Save after recording is finished." option limits the time of your recording to 25 seconds.

The Adjust tab gives you the same adjustment choices as IA Capture, and the General tab lets you change between resolutions of 160 x 120 or 180 x 135 along with many other options that can be easily interpreted from the pictures above.

IA VideoMail saves video recordings to AVI format and encodes them with the MJPEG codec. This format can be viewed on almost any modern computer anywhere. The only problem is that there aren't a lot of Pocket PCs that can play this video format; so sending the videos to be played on other Pocket PCs might be a little difficult. Right now, IA VideoMail and the newest release of PQview are the only two programs I can think of, that will let you view MJPEG AVI files on a Pocket PC. Both programs have demo versions available but the full versions will cost some money.

One thing to note about this program is that it contradicts Windows' memory management pretty often. You will need to watch your Pocket PC's memory pretty closely to make sure you don't miss saving a lot of recordings. I found myself switching back to the Memory applet frequently in order to relocate more memory for storage. Using a storage card for saving your videos will probably help avoid a lot of these problems.

Conclusion

In the end, I would highly advise against buying this to replace your standalone digital camera, as the quality between the two is not even comparable. Thought the camera might be good for video conferencing through Microsoft Portrait 2.0, I would also advise against buying this camera if you're thinking of recording some serious video footage--180 x 135 is not the greatest resolution for taking serious video.
Overall though, the FlyCAM-CF is a good little CompactFlash Camera that fulfills its purpose fairly well. It lets you capture decent 640 x 480 images that can be viewed on the computer or through the web, and it serves as a very nice camera for video conferencing too.