Creative bundles the Optia with its Live! Cam Center control panel, which works with Live! Cam Console - an instant messaging app with two modes: Live! Audio and Live! View. Live! View lets you control exposure levels, brightness, contrast and colour and to swap between the auto and manual focus. However, we found the auto-focus to be very effective. There are also options to pan and tilt the lens from within the software, but doing this manually is more effective. We could also apply video effects to the image on screen, which tracked us around the page and were pretty funny really.

Jim, what were you thinking?

The software's Smart Face Tracking feature is supposed to track facial movements automatically around the screen to keep the face constantly in the video frame, but instead it just messed up the expose level and made the onscreen image unclear.