Philips ToUCam

Although I wasn’t able to find this at the sort of discount I received on the QuickCam VC, this camera is still worth the money. All comments by users on the QCUAIG mailing list indicate this is a great webcam for astronomical use. I purchased the camera in early April, and have only tried to use it once conneted to a small, 133 MHz Cyrix MediaGX computer running Windows 98. I have Vega, a program written by Colin Bownes, to capture images. Vega is oriented more toward some of the operations you want to do in amateur astronomy rather than general webcam stuff. However, I’m having some problems with MediaGX machine that make me think it and Windows don’t really get along all that well (I mean, even worse than Windows normally is).

Since I originally purchased the camera, there have been a number of exciting developments with the Philips webcams. Steve Chambers has put together a number of hardware modifications (see here for the ToUCam Pro) to enable true long exposure photography. I have not made this modification (yet), but the results look very promising.

I obtained an adapter from Stephen Mogg which is a nicely machined piece of black plastic which prevents me from having to open up the camera and break something, as I did with my QuickCam VC.

The ToUCam Pro is no longer marketed in the USA, but is imported for microscopy work by PocketScope

I have a used laptop I received from a friend, but it is an older model with no USB port and no O/S installed. I installed Slackware Linux, but the Linux PCMCIA support doesn’t include any USB cards. I’ve been completely unsuccessful at getting Windows 95/98 installed; something is flaky with the CDROM. Even with Slackware Linux, I was unable to install from the CDROM and had to do a network install.