What exactly is USB? Learn what advantages a USB 2.0 webcam brings to your video chat experience, and the big difference between a USB 2.0 certified and USB 2.0 compatible webcam.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus and supports plug-and-play peripherals via an external port on a computer. The recently available USB 2.0 boosts data transfer speeds by 40 times over the older USB 1.1 standard. USB 1.1 is sufficient for low-speed devices like keyboards and mice, but for data-intensive applications like video streaming or large file transfers to external devices, the advantages of higher data transfer rates become obvious.

For a webcam, USB 2.0 gives better performance than ever: more true colors, bigger images, higher framerates, and no loss of image detail. It also:

• reduces the workload on your computer. Since the webcam can send fully uncompressed video, your PC does not waste time uncompressing incoming video.
• reduces potential errors due to compression and decompression.
• gives you full video-editing control. USB 2.0 lets you to capture full, uncompressed video streams on the computer, and compress images or reduce file sizes.

Don't be fooled by the competition.

There is a difference between a USB 2.0 certified and USB 2.0 compatible webcam. The latter is simply a USB 1.1 webcam, capable of data transfer speeds of only 12Mbps. It is USB 2.0 compatible as it is able to work with a computer that has a USB 2.0 host controller, and is required to work at the camera's lower transfer speed. So all USB 1.1 cameras are USB 2.0 compatible.

How do know if you have USB 2.0?

• Select Control Panel on your computer
• Double-click System
• Then click the Hardware tab
• Click the Device Manager button
• Within the Device Manager, click the Universal Serial Bus Controllers folder
• If in the list of controllers you see the word "Enhanced", the system has USB 2.0 high-speed capability.