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Just a few years ago, the use of videophones was the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. However, the growth of broadband Internet in the home, as well as a quickly growing range of free software ("soft phones"), means anyone with broadband and a webcam can talk to friends and family across the world while looking them in the eye. The best bit about setting up a webcam and video-chatting with VoIP? It's really, really simple.
Use of webcams
Many modern laptops, particularly Macs but also many newer PC laptops, come with a web cam installed. If you have no webcam, you can pick one up for as little as $20. The more you spend, the more megapixels it will have, meaning a higher quality image. Although, as video-call quality is also restricted by other things such as your web connection and the distance the call has to travel, many people find the cheaper option suitable.
Bear in mind that with slower broadband the use of video may denigrate the call quality slightly, but check and compare with and without; sometimes VoIP calls are poor quality regardless!
Setting up your webcam
Once you have your new webcam home, unpack and browse the manual. You might think you don't need to, but it's always good idea. You'll need to insert the installation software, and depending on when the model was released, check for driver updates (if an icon for installation doesn't appear on the desktop, head for your CD ROM drive in "My Computer" or "Finder" and click on it), which it may prompt you to do automatically. Alternatively, you can head to the company's website to get these. Either way, it should work without the very latest version.
After plugging in the USB cable and mounting your camera where you want, you should be ready to go. Check to see if the lighting is good enough (depending on the quality of your camera this may differ), and adjust colour, brightness, and contrast of your monitor accordingly.
System requirements for webcam VoIP
Once your webcam is installed, open up a soft phone. The most common video-calls programme is Skype, but there are others like Google Talk and Sightspeed, which are all free. Once you've figured out how to run this, there is, in Skype for example, simply a button you hit (on the Skype part of the screen) with a picture of a camera on it. After hitting this, your image is available both to you and the person at the other end!
In addition, you'll need a relatively fast upload speed to make it worthwhile. In years gone by when home users barely did any uploading to the web at all, this wasn't really necessary, but with the growth of file-sharing and video conferencing with VoIP programmes, it's more important. Most home internet connections have much faster download rates than upload, but the faster the upload rate you have, the smoother your chat will be! As for system requirements, video calls require a bit more oomph than audio calls, but most modern computers can handle it. You'll need a computer with at least a 1 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM plus, a webcam and a little free space (no more than 50 MB) on your hard drive.