[iceman (Mike)]

In response to Gary's question about frame rate, he said that he was always brought up to believe 10fps is best..

When I started pondering this question, I asked some of the experts at CN land and Bird amonst others replied, and the general gist is this..

The ToUcam uses the USB 1 interface, and so if you're using 640x480 and 15fps or higher, the only way for the ToUcam to send data quick enough down the thin pipe is to compress it.

So ideally, you want to use 5fps all the time, as this won't compress the data and your raw frames will be cleaner.

But, if the seeing is bad, you want to take a lot of frames so that you can find the good ones amongst the mush. In this case, you might use 15fps to get more frames in a shorter amount of time, accepting that you will lose some quality due to compression.

So, seeing = good, use 5fps. Seeing = bad, use 15fps. A happy middleground = 10fps, which is probably why most people recommend it.

If the ToUcam worked on USB 2, you could probably use 15fps or 30fps without compression, but to my knowledge, a USB 2 compatible ToUcam doesn't exist.

As for Bird, he uses a firewire camera on a firewire card, which can transfer data much quicker, therefore he's able to use 25fps and gather lots of frames in a short amount of time without compressing the data.

I hope i've got all the facts right, i'm sure Bird or someone else will correct me (please do) if i'm wrong.