These comparisons put this 6 LED webcam (left column) up against an unmodified Xbox Live Vision webcam (right column), under various lighting conditions. On the plus side, the claimed focus range from 3 cm seems true. I guess I need a webcam with a proper USB microphone instead. It does have a line in socket, but it appears a microphone would need amplification to register anything. Sadly it doesn't have a microphone input socket. I actually bought this to use on my work computer for occasional conference calls. Even trying to do the above photo without the webcam moving much was a pain! Having the cable coming out of the back of the camera unit itself doesn't help either. The trouble if is just free standing and you touch the LED dial the webcam is so light it wobbles and moves. The base works OK on a flat surface, but the "clip" is almost useless for attaching to a monitor or laptop screen.
If you try adjusting this while using it for video chat, expect to suffer accidental afterglow on your retina for a while afterwards.
The dial is surprisingly sensitive in the range you might want to use it - and blindly bright at full power from screen distance. What I thought looked interesting on this webcam was the six LEDs, controlled via a dimmer switch on the cable about 20cm (8 inches) from the camera. The cable is as advertised 120cm (4 foot), the last 15cm (6 inches) of which are forked for the separate USB and microphone 3.5mm jacks. The writing on the lens says Megapixel 10X Digital Zoom f=3.85mm which would be fine if I could get even one megapixel out of it! That silver section on the top is a button - presumably to take a snapshot if your software supports it. It seems like the eBay seller is two orders of magnitude out by claiming 30 mega-pixels! Under Linux, I could only get up to 640x480 pixels, which is 300k or 0.3 mega-pixels.