The Kodak EZ200 is part of a small line of cameras able to perform double duty both as a webcam and as a standalone digital camera.  Installation of the software may seem a bit laborious when installing the multitude of drivers on your system, but the operation of the camera is pretty much straightforward afterwards.  Just plug it in and go.

The picture quality is acceptable for a 640x480 pixel resolution camera, delivering decent if not incredibly sharp pictures with the usual white balance errors (bluish overcast on outdoor shots, reddish overcast on indoor shots).  You can focus up to two inches from your subject matter with relative ease although not as close as right against the lens as is the case with the IBM PC Camera Pro Max.  Then again, the Kodak EZ200 doesn't suffer from the horrendous magenta cast as seen on the IBM camera.

As a digital camera, don't expect to find the same features as other full-featured digital cameras such as replaceable memory modules, flash and LCD screen.  Even the focus capability is disabled.  The camera forces you to set the focus ring to the infinity mode and will not work at all when set to any other position.  On the flip side, the camera does have a self-timer, a 10 second movie mode, a multi-shoot capability, a capacity for eighty 640x480 images on the 4 MB of available memory, and battery life simply not available in most standard digital cameras.  Picture choices include high quality (640x480) and low quality (320x240) modes with the multi-shoot mode locked at 320x240 and the movie mode locked at about 160x120.

As a webcam, the camera does exactly what it should do and satisfies those needs very well.  As a quick-and-dirty little spy camera, it does that job very nicely once you black out the silver painted components and cover up the LED light.

All this delivered in a package available for under $100 at Zellers.  Not bad for a reasonably sophisticated multipurpose camera.

Although it might not be a webcam, the WinTV USB module can accept an external signal from any camcorder.  The composite input's comb filter is not very good, but the S-Video input is fully functional, delivering high quality images from just about any respectable video source, including Macrovision-encoded signals from DVD players.

Once you have installed the software from the CD-ROM, you should download the latest upgrades from Hauppauge's Web site which will dramatically improve the performance of the WinTV module.  And being TWAIN compliant, the device will function properly with third party software such as WebCam32 and Microsoft's NetMeeting.  Drawbacks include the inability to rescale the image which is not unusual since the device was designed to work with TV images, the equivalent of a 640x480 AVI stream running at 30 FPS.

A slight correction.  Using the Webcam32 software, you can easily rescale the image.  The choices range between 160x120 and 352x288.  Colour depth can be as high as 24 bits although I'm not certain the signal source can properly supply that colour depth.  At 320x240 and 16 bit colour depth, the image quality from this device is still much better than the image quality delivered by the vast majority of webcams on the market.

Rather buggy.  The software updates seem to cause more problems than they solve.  The Windows AVICAP*.DLL files on my system became unusable and I had to reload them.  The TWAIN support is very flaky, causing both the camera and USB support to crash completely under Windows NetMeeting after about a minute of operation.

The camera's circuitry is very susceptible to radio interference and the automated picture controls are rather unstable and unreliable under low light conditions.  As a result, the overall picture quality is very poor.  On the flip side, the depth of field is excellent and you can focus on an object positioned right against the lens housing.  And despite it's unstable performance under low light conditions, the camera can still capture a somewhat usable image, even under the kind of conditions that would make most consumer camcorders simply give up.

Latest update.  Xirlink has introduced new versions of their IBM PC Camera software for the Windows XP platform.  Although the annoying software bugs seem to have been eliminated, the camera still suffers from poor picture quality.