Review: Philips SPC7 15NC webcam

The Philips SPC7 15NC webcam is a lightweight webcam that sits on top of your monitor or laptop.

It has a maximum video resolution of 640x480, a 3X digital zoom, an inbuilt microphone and comes with a software console that is fully adjustable in terms of brightness, colour, contrast and so on. Image quality in use was excellent, and it paired effortlessly with Skype and MSN Messenger.

But as good as this webcam is, we have a major complaint with it. When installing the supplied software, our security software threw up an alert, quarantining a utility called Hacktool.HideWindows before it was loaded onto our machine.

We spoke to both Philips and Symantec about the alert.

Symantec told us that it was usually harmless and is used by developers for hiding windows. But in malicious use, it is used for the same purpose by hackers and is not an alert that anyone buying a commercial product should be subjected to. Philips, despite two promises of a response, never got back to us to explain why it was shipping software with such an alert.

Looking at the hardware alone, this is comfortably a four star product, but the software is part of the total package and therefore plays a role in the review. Because the software threw up the alert in the first place, and because the follow-up response from Philips was poor in dealing with it, we can only give the SPC7 15NC two stars.

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