My one disappointment with my Apple Cinema Display is that it doesn't include an iSight camera in the bezel. The iMacs have 'em, and so do all the laptops, but if you plunk down the big bucks for an external Apple display you get bupkis. To make it worse, you can't even buy an external iSight camera at retail any longer, and the prices on eBay for used ones have gone through the roof. And, to really make things annoying, none of the big names in webcams certify their devices with OS X; you're left hoping that independent solutions like macam can come through for you.
However, this sad state of affairs has quietly changed, and I'm bewildered why Apple hasn't promoted the fact better. Starting with 10.4.3, Apple included support for webcams that comply with the USB Video Class (UVC) device profile, and as of 10.4.9, iChat supports UVC webcams for video chats. How do you tell if a webcam complies with UVC? Look for the "Certified for Windows Vista" logo! That's right—Vista requires webcams to support UVC before they can display the Vista certification logo, so that logo becomes a handy guide to those webcams that'll work on your Mac, too.
I picked up a couple of webcams from Logitech today, the QuickCam Ultra Vision and the QuickCam Laptop Pro. Both worked within a second or two of being plugged in, and neither required any software to install. (Installing them on Windows XP, however, required a tedious software install.) I was able to do a video conference in iChat quickly and easily, reinforcing the notion that stuff "just works" on a Mac.
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