The Microsoft Lifecam for many is becoming very popular with Astro Imagers. Any why not, they are relatively cheap for the money and produce some fine results as we have found.

HOWEVER, the catch is retailers are starting to smell a rat and putting the price up with now the average camera being sold for over £30 this is before you have modded it yourself and paid for the new case to be added. So the cost can sore to anything up to £80-90 to include cost of shipping of all these bits. Not to mention the worries and anxiety of modding your own. One false move, £30+ quid down the drain on a camera with warranty ruined!

Well we’ve teamed up with an engineering company to offer a solution. We are able to offer these cameras fully modded and complete with their case for £80 that will include cost of P&P (Uk Mainland only). We’ll even throw in some free tutorials on how to use the camera to get the best results from it.

Both of the above images were taken with the Microsoft Lifecam by Alastair Leith who himself purchased and modded one of these after frying his own Toucam.

The great thing about this camera is it can capture with 640×480 at 30 fps, many other cameras only manage 15 fps. There IS a way to get it to higher res for the same framerate but we’ve found its necessary to buy a codec for this.(£17 or so).

There are many software solutions which can shoot using this camera, however we’ve had best results from SharpCap which nicely produces avi files, the format needed for Registax to work its magic.