When I originally bought my Mac, I avoided buying an Apple iSight camera, as I figured they were a little expensive; however more recently I’ve been convinced of the need to buy a decent webcam. Unfortunately, getting hold of an external iSight now is very difficult as they have been withdrawn from sale in the US and Europe (if not worldwide) – I had to pay over the odds on eBay to secure mine (until then I’d been using a DV camcorder on a firewire cable) – but even so, I thought I’d publish a couple of links that might be useful for iChat AV users thinking about their choice of webcam:

• EZ Jim’s iSight versus DV camcorder or other webcam page at Ralph Johns’ site gives a number of reasons why it might be worth investing in an iSight (I was amazed at how much better the external iSight image quality is compared with a built-in iSight, or with the the Sony CMR-PC1 USB webcam that I used on the PC and featured in a screen shot as part of my recent post about video conferencing using iChat AV on a Mac and AIM on a Windows PC).
• EZ Jim also has a page about some applications you can use with iSight.

This screen shot was captured earlier this evening using the external iSight camera and even though it was taken in a dark room under a mixture of compact fluorescent and halogen light sources, the camera has done a pretty good job of both the exposure and the focus… although by the look of the bags under my eyes, I need more sleep!