Using a PC, I use the ViCam camera ($200), which I couldn't recommend more.  You can get it from a company called Vista Imaging, search the web and find them.  It's hard to find in stores, and also hard to find in catalogs.  It's a bit backordered.  Fry's Electronics in California consistently carries it though.  The camera does better in low light than my eyes do, which is very very very rare for a digital camera, and it also has a non vaporware lenspack ($60) with a wide-angle and two (semi-lame) levels of zoom.  Don't even consider the damn QuickCams, since they totally absolutely suck.  Another example of the most dominant product being the inferior one.  (Anyone have the word Microsoft floating around their head right now?).  To make the movies I use the program Gotcha ($70) from Prescient Technologies, you should be able to find the demo at download.com.   It only records when it detects motion, so I just leave it running and come back to a video of boiled down action.   It's a great program, recommended.  I do my live feeds using the program WebCam32 ($25), which I also totally recommend.  And I use Adobe Premiere 4.2 to stitch everything together and add a goofy soundtrack. 

A couple other programs that are nice for doing webcam stuff are AVI Constructor Set ($75) (takes a list of jpegs and makes an AVI movie out of them, and is also nice for managing huge picture archives) and Irfan View (free) (also good for managing picture archives, and it's freeware).  You can get them both from download.com.

-Hugh Mann April 7 1999