iSight alternatives

Reader Beth Belmonte seeks choice in webcams. She writes:

Other than Apple’s iSight, which other brand and model of webcam can I use?

By default, iChat supports the iSight as well as FireWire camcorders. You can also video-iChat your way to happiness with a USB webcam compatible with Mac OS X and a copy of Ecamm Network’s $10 iChatUSBCam, a utility that mucks with iChat to allow it to accept input from one of these cameras.

In addition to providing support for iChat, iChatUSBCam enables videoconferencing on Macs that iChat doesn’t natively support, lets you adjust the camera’s brightness and contrast, and allows you to choose your Mac’s screen as a video source.

Ecamm provides a list of known working configurations and cameras here. Note that many of these USB webcams require the open-source Macam driver to work with Mac OS X.