AIR - USB Web/Document Camera

We are suddenly shifting to online classes because of Covid-19 and I needed quickly a document camera.Pros: Inexpensive. Freestanding, so no need for a jury-rigged support. It does not require a strong light.Cons: 1. the "instruction sheet" only tells us to screw the neck into the base (duh), plug the USB cable into (you guessed it!) a USB port of the computer. And a link to All In Learning which doesn't give instructions on how to use it either and has no apparent service desk etc. It took me several hours of internet searches to be able to work with it. If you have familiarity with webcams and their software, you may do better.2. The base is a bit light, you need to add some weight to it-not much.3. The switch on the cord in the picture on Amazon does not exist: the camera turns on when you plug it in.4. I could not find a way to turn on the 4 lamps of its head, but it works OK even without them (you'll have to live with some shade according to where you place the external lamp.5. No software, nor recommendations. I tried to use PhotoBooth (on my Mac) but it projects a mirror image ( No way to turn unflip it in preview mode, which is what you have before recording). The cure was to downloaded (for free) Quick Camera which does always flip. Again, some instructions would have spared me hours of struggle.6. This is as basic as it can be. OK for me, but if you want anything else which is standard in document cameras, forget it.All that said, it seems to work well enough for my purpose (at least in a test of the system-we will go live in a week...)Update. I have used now the document camera for my online class for one month and have upgraded by one star my ranking. It served as an essential tool enabling me to write solutions to questions students asked me and it worked without major hitches. My concern about its stability was overblown: it never fell or even moved. The manual focusing was OK. One flaw is the relatively small size of the page that it can capture: when positioned at a distance so to capture the width of one page, it covers only about one third of the height of the page. So it is easy to start writing below what gets projected and students had to repeatedly alert me to the problem and ask me to shift up the paper. I am not sure if there was a way to rearrange/turn the projection so capture a larger part of the page.Still, for its price it did a wonderful job

The pic quality is decent, for the price. Biggest difficulty was my not knowing how to set up. All Learning Chat site-gives some info if using their product with the camera, but no support otherwise. They did give me a site to see if camera was working ( webcamtest.com) and it was. I Called A random company that sells DC, person suggested I find if the App or platform I wanted to use the camera with offered the ability to “switch” video outputs (most ask you if they can enable your camera for video). Initially did not find this info, then I simply looked on my “video/picture” when on the platform I was using, saw 3 white dots ( one for video source, audio and something else) there I was able to change and use the camera - which gave me A view computer screen view while still connected on the platform. I Needed DC for Speech Therapy Telemedicine platform. Good for price, those DC’s are costly!

The camera comes with no software so you have to download extensions to flip the image as it projects a mirror image. Some platforms will allow for it and project a mirror image like Zoom or Screen Castify.Why do they put lights in the camera and there's no way to turn them on!

I use this for online lessons and training and it works great. Only drawback is it can be a little difficult to position what you want under the camera, but it does not take up too much space on my desk which is nice.

There is no way I can find to turn on the lights circling the lens. The camera quality is not very high. I use this for drawing videos so that matters but it would probably be fine for other things.

This is a nice inexpensive camera (and it would have been a great deal if it had included image capture or scanning software of some type)

This camera gets the job done, but it is very unstable and tips regularly if not weighted at the base.

The company was unwilling to help me figure out how to make this work on my computer. So I am still trying to get it to function right side up.