An anonymous reader writes: So — I have a windows machine hooked up to my 46" samsung LCD in the living room. Makes for a good social browsing experience. I started using it for video chat, and found it to be great except for the lack of optical zoom on my webcam (which is a pretty good one — the logitech quickcam pro 9000. When I sit on the couch about 9 feet away, I appear too small, the microphone has more trouble picking me up, and the digital zoom is of course useless at improving things. So I sit on my coffee table about 4 feet away from this huge LCD so the other person can actually see the expression on my face, defeating that 10-foot experience.
I thought to myself — "self, this should be pretty easy. Go grab a webcam with a bit of optical zoom, and maybe get a wireless headset to improve the sound quality on the mic." The wireless headset was pretty easy to find — lots of bluetooth solutions out there. as well as a stereo wireless headset by logitech called the clearchat, which I just got. But nowhere is there a tv-top-mount web cam with optical zoom with windows drivers. I'm a bit astounded... I tried just moving my wired webcam closer to me, setting it down on the coffee table and pointing it up at me, but then the experience is quite odd — I'm looking at the tv screen to see my skype-buddy, but it looks to them that I'm looking far into the distance, because the angles are all wrong, which is disconcerting for them, because that's the same way I like when I'm ignoring someone :)
Anyway — here's what I did find — the sony eye USB device (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Eye), which has a manual optical zoom, but that's optimized for PS3 only, and has no windows drivers — in other words, no skype or other windows video chat. I also found some webcams seemingly optimized for the 10-foot experience (http://shop.skype.com/intl/en-ca/skype-for-tv/), and they're USB devices as well (sounds good) , but.... you need a skype-enabled TV for these. WHAAAA?? Again no windows drivers. Also found this guy: (http://www.everythingusb.com/net_cowboy_dc-ncp130.html) with a mondo 7x optical zoom , but... it isn't really tv-mountable, and thus would suffer from the "faraway stare" problem if place, say, on the shelf next to the tv. People might also think I'm the creepy neighbor next door with a 7x optical zoom webcam.
So. I'm looking for better options. Anyone?