2010 should be the year of the HD webcam, at least if all the announcements at CES back in January are anything to by. However, Microsoft launched its first HD capable webcam last year when it introduced the LifeCam Cinema. This was a rather pricey at $80/€50 and with that in mind we’re talking a look at its more affordable sibling, the LifeCam HD-5000.

The LifeCam HD-5000 has an MSRP of $49.95 (about €37) and can already be found retailing for as little as $40. This makes it the first truly affordable HD capable webcam. It’s of course “limited” to 720p, but this isn’t a huge problem, since most standard internet connections won’t allow you to stream video in 1080 anyhow. As this is a more affordable model to the LifeCam Cinema, Microsoft has of course removed a few features, but none of them appear to have a huge impact on the performance.

Check out the video review below for the full breakdown of what’s missing and what’s new, as well as some quality tests and a look at some of the software features.

To sum things up, the LifeCam HD-5000 is well worth the money when you consider that many more basic models that lack HD video support will cost as much, if not more. What we’d like to see is a fix that stabilizes the autofocus as it can get quite annoying at times, especially when it decides to re-focus after very small movements. Another oddity is that unless you drop down to 320x240, all other resolutions are in 16:9 which means that if you want to use it with something like Skype, then you end up with 640x360 which is actually a lower resolution than you’d get with a standard VGA capable webcam.

The HD-5000 can also capture stills in “4x HD” mode, which an interpolated resolution of 2,560x1,440. We’re also not so keen on the fact that when you change the resolution, the settings interface scales to a smaller size as well. This means that you end up having to scroll through the menu options which don’t make a lot of sense. In any of the lower resolution modes you can use the “smart” zoom feature and once you zoom in, you can also pan and tilt the image, although this is as we said in the video, a crop from the video captured by the full sensor resolution.

The default capture file format is of course WMV as this is a Microsoft product. It’s possible to capture video in 640x480 using third party applications, but we had a hard time finding any application that was willing to capture video at 720p. The camera works just fine with Skype, but again, it won’t do 720p, as it seems like Skype requires you to use one of its approved cameras with a hardware encoder built in.

Overall though the LifeCam HD-5000 is an affordable device for those that are looking for an HD capable webcam. It delivers in terms of image quality, although as you can hear in the video, the audio quality is slightly tinny. Still, it’s hard to knock it considering the price and the overall performance, despite the autofocus issues and somewhat lacking third party software support.

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