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Re: automagic brightness

> In a response i got from scott, i think he said that the camera returned
> some brightness value? 

I'm not sure -- I suspect I misread something from Russell.  I haven't 
seen one anywhere yet, but I haven't been checking return values 
everywhere, and we still don't know what several commands do.

I'm probably going to add a stub for a brightness-adjuster in my next 
release.  I don't know if it'll do anything :-), but at least the stub 
will be there.  Hopefully that will promote some progress.

On an almost completely unrelated note, I spent some time yesterday 
seeing what happens when you take several images of a still object and 
then sum the result.  I have a few sample images that are a lot clearer 
than a normal 6-bit scan.  Nothing really unexpected, of course, but 
the repeated scans average out the noise in the scan and produce a much 
better picture.  I might add a "multi-scan and average" mode to qcam in 
the near future if anyone's interested.

I then tried to see what happens when you try to use the QuickCam in 
the dark.  I turned out the lights, and turned off the monitor, and 
discovered that a sum of 100 consecutive scans can almost make out 
things in the dark.  I had to use the color editor in xv before I could 
see anything, but in the end I could make our both of my bookshelves 
and most of the books on one of them.  This was similar to what I could 
see with my eyes a few seconds after turning off the lights.  Those of 
you with cameras pointing out windows might want to try this for your 
night scenes.

The big problem was that the image seems to fade to white if you don't 
read it fast enough.  Has anyone else noticed this?  I've seen it when 
I've tried using qcam with a lot of debugging code added -- the picture 
keeps getting lighter and lighter as you wait, so you end up with a 
scan that's a lot darker at the top then at the bottom.  When you're 
trying to resolve nearly black images it doesn't take much fading to 
destroy what little signal there is.  I'll let others speculate why 
this happens :-).

> BTW: does anyone know if connectix is aware of this driver yet?

They're aware of it.  I haven't heard from them, but I do have a copy 
of the FTP logs from nas.com, and two people from connectix.com have 
accessed the ftp archives.  I don't know *what* they accessed, but I 
don't think there's anything else of substance on the site.  I mean, 
the FTP usage has more than tripled since I put qcam there.  Is anyone 
from connectix.com on the mailing list? 


Scott
-- 
Scott A. Laird   |  "But this goes to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615"
scott@laird.com  |                - Nigel on his new 64-bit computer
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