2008-01-25: I bought three Philips SPC 900 NC webcams at $50/ea based on Andreas Geiger's success in using them under Linux with Intel's open-source OpenCV computer vision library (also used with success by Stanford's prize-winning robot car).
I was delighted to find that everything was plug-and-play: I
plugged the camera into my Linux box, compiled and ran Andreas'
grabber_demo app, and here's my first snapshot:
Life just doesn't get any better! :)
Many thanks to Andreas for posting a great "Hello, world!" webcam app for OpenCV, which is otherwise a bit forbidding to get started with.
(FWIW, we've also used the camera with Mac and Windows, with equal lack of incident.)
One of my ambitions is to have several of those $30 R/C model airplanes and/or helicopters fly in formation under computer control, with 2-6 webcams providing the necessary attitude and altitude feedback via opencv and some custom coding. Before that, I'll probably use this set-up to code up some other vision-based art projects that have been backed up at here at Geekhaven awaiting suitable hardware and software.