Buy PlayStation 4 Camera
CUSTOMER REVIEW
I picked up the Playstation 4 Camera alongside my PS4 and it was the first thing I tried out.
After less than 24 hours it's clear that the camera has a lot of potential but is still missing a compelling gaming function. The Playroom set of minigames that come with the camera are made by Double Fine, and are a lot of fun but very very short. You won't get a ton of play out of them.
The really nice feature is the facial auto-login and tracking to see who is holding what controller. Very quick and seamless.
The sensor itself is only 720P, which is a bit of a disappointment, but its low light performance is surprisingly good. I used it with the lights off and just morning low light coming through the closed shades, and it seemed to report a much brighter room than the one I was sitting in. The image is fairly grainy, but it's definitely serviceable. Suspect the choice to go with a 720P sensor was so
they could make larger cells that absorb more light.
It also has a very wide field of vision. Definitely larger than the original Kinect.
Speaking of Kinect, the gesture recognition seems to be decent. You can wave at the Playroom robots and they wave back. But there isn't an app or anything that lets you see what the PS Camera is "seeing" as far as gesture detection so it's hard to really know. No kinect-like Skeleton overlay, at least none that I've found as yet.
Haven't used the camera for Twitch yet but I suspect that is its real draw. And it's high enough resolution that you should be able to do a PIP of your face while gaming and still be relatively recognizable.
Four stars for simply working well and being nice and compact. Much prefer this size for a camera, being able to tuck it under the lip of my TV stand on top of the Wii U sensor bar, than a large chunky footprint of my 360 Kinect, and eventually XB1 Kinect 2.0, both of which are just a bit too large for me aesthetically in my living room. I always put the Kinect camera away when I'm not using it because it just looks too big ... the Playstation 4 Camera is nice and unobtrusive and I can tuck its cord away to be nearly invisible. Considering motion gaming makes up about ... oh ... 0.0000003% of my Television time, making it small is a big thing to get me to leave it connected.
Would update to 5 stars if there is ever an actually compelling gaming reason to own the camera, but I'm getting it more for video chatting with friends and for the promise of future voice commands. But I can understand why most people would opt to skip the camera for now ... there isn't a huge reason to get it yet.