Doc Cams @ ISTE 2013

While the number of document camera companies exhibiting at the ISTE 2013 conference was down this year, offerings in visualizer features evidenced a small spike upwards. Here is a quick survey of new things happening in the world of document cameras at the ISTE 2013 conference, in blistering hot San Antonio:

HoverCam

Hovercam was featuring a new partnership with Zoom, offering a nice troika of document camera—video conferencing—remote collaboration that is hard to beat. Basically, they are combining forces to offer high-definition screen sharing, annotation, MP4 recording, and live conferencing for up to 25 participants—on any Mac, Windows, iOS or Android device.  The extensibility to mobile devices is noteworthy. They were also showing off their new HoverCam mini 5, which is smaller than a water bottle, but as powerful as the big boy visualizers.

QOMO

QOMO was on display with great enthusiasm, revealing their new visualizers, like the QD3900 and the nicely portable QPC70, with new HDMI input/output features. Basically, this allows schools to connect high-def devices to the document camera or connect the document camera itself to projectors or classroom displays that offer high-definition capabilities, like HD TVs.

Elmo

Elmo rolled out their UVC (USB video class compliant) TT-12i. That means it is able to stream video smoothly, enabling high-quality use in video conferencing, distance learning, and lesson recording.

IPEVO

IPEVO was highlighting their new VGA/USB Dual-Mode document camera, the VZ-1 HD. This feature allows the educator to bypass the computer, if necessary, and display directly through a projector. Nothing new, but a useful functions  in some school settings. What I liked better was the hard switch for selecting camera resolution.