someone should make vuescan but for old usb webcams instead of scanners

turns out my suspicions were correct, this is the exact same as the Vivitar ViviCam 5355, only rebadged for Polaroid as the i534, long after they became just a brand name

i mean look

i finally got it working on virtualbox and it's just as bad as you can expect, super dark and no focus control (gotta use the autofocus in point-and-shoot mode, then plug it in while it's still on)

i love camera jank

oh also i opened this camera up today (to try to see if i could find anything obviously wrong causing the erratic auto-focus, but i didn't) and i found clearly labeled serial port test pins 👀 something for a future test maybe

this is what i mean by the autofocus randomly not working, on pics 1 and 2. i made the camera run through autofocus a couple of times, made sure it was set to focus to infinity, and the camera reassured me it was in focus. this mess came out

other picture came out fine tho

when i took it apart yesterday i still didn't manage to get all the way down to the sensor, so it's possible the sensor is dirty or something like that. the marks on the camera body do suggest this might've been banged about a bit in the past

if you have the patience for the 5-6 tries it takes until it focuses properly, the lens on this thing is actually really nice. 3x optical zoom and a surprisingly impressive macro