Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

OK, I did a search but it brought up no results at all. I always have trouble with macnn searching, so this doesn't surprise me.

My question is this: Are there any good web cams that work with both Macs (Powerbook 12") & windows? This is for my Brother in law. He travels a lot for work & would love to see his son on nights when he's not home. I know the isight would work with his mac, but his windows box doesn't have Firewire, so I'm hoping there are some other decent options.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Any UVC compliant USB webcam will work on Macs. I'm sure they'd work on Windows too, if the webcam makers want to make any money.

Note that I didn't say any USB webcam - you have to check for UVC.

Cheapest one is the Xbox camera (no autofocus or display mount, though) - Xbox.com | Accessories - Xbox LIVE Vision Camera

Thanks for the info. I'll have a look

Funny, I just picked up the Xbox cam a few days ago. Works straight away, 10.5.2. Overall better quality picture than my firewire ibot cam which is like 8 years old at this point, and looks much nicer too.

The quality of the Xbox camera is surprisingly good. I actually prefer mine over the built-in iSight on my MBP.

Only complaint about it is the lack of autofocus - you have to turn the little knob to get the focus where you want it. Once you have that set, though, you're good to go.

Thanks again. Looks like it's the xbox camera then.

Agreed, a UVC compliant web cam is the only sensible choice for driverless plug and play on Mac OS X 10.4+ and Windows XP/Vista. [ Several specific known-working UVC cams are listed here: Mac Compatible Webcam List : UVC Driverless Web Cams For Apple Mac-Vista-Linux ] For Macs running Windows using Parallells or VMWare you may have to unplug/replug if you switch between video apps between environments to get the other App/OS to recognize it's availability.