Customer Rating: 
Summary: very noisy audio
Comment: I bought this Microsoft webcam for my parents so they could see their grandkids. The video is fine, but I should have believed the reviews about very noisy audio problems. The audio has a high-pitched scratchy hum that makes it too annoying to listen to for any length of time. I do not recommend this camera.
Customer Rating: Summary: Great Little Webcam! Plus, easy way to do the driver install.
Comment: This is a great little webcam. Better than any I've ever used. And indeed it works quite well in low light. Hard to beat for the money.
Best of all, you can throw away the Microsoft installation CD with its 50MB of garbageware. Just plug the camera in a USB port and the camera drivers automatically install. Camera installs as a USB Video Camera and as a USB audio device. Skype finds and uses the camera just fine this way.
I had trepidatiously started with the CD, knowing the capacious amount of Microsoft crapware that would be installed, but even worse, without asking, the CD proceeded to try and download and install Live Messenger, which is enormous piece of s**tware that will take over your system. Fortunately, this failed as the Microsoft download server for Windows Live seemed to be down. I gave up and killed the install. Looking around, nothing at all seemed to have installed, but I did a system restore of the restore point I had done immediately attempting this install, having figured that I might regret installing from the CD.
While I was waiting for all of this, I just plugged the VX-5000 into another computer, and the standard USB camera drivers simply autoinstalled, so I did the same thing on the original system after the system restore completed.
The VX-5000 worked just fine, and worked just fine on Skype.
My advice is to throw the CD away and just plug the thing in.
The two systems I tried this on were both Windows XP.
Expertise level: I work on Windows PC software for a living.
Customer Rating: Summary: User friendly
Comment: I bought this webcam for myself and 3 family members to keep in touch long distance. Product works great and is very simple to use once installed. Setup a bit more complicated than it needed to be, but fairly intuitive. Good product for the price.
Customer Rating: Summary: Good Deal on Great Webcam
Comment: My wife and I live far from our mothers, so we bought them these webcams to stay in touch with us. We got both on sale here for what it normally costs for one. I installed the one for my mother-in-law and it went it no hassle and is easy for her to use.
Customer Rating: Summary: NOT FOR LAPTOPS
Comment: I just received this item and was very disappointed that the clip is not made for laptops. When I did the search thru Amazon "web cams for laptops" this item comes up first. I cannot speak to the quality or performance but I hope this helps someone else not make the same mistake.
