We tested it on my mother. She sat in the good chair, the one facing the window for "natural light." On the Dell’s 15-inch LCD, her face appeared. It was soft, like an oil painting left in the rain. The colors were a little off—her red sweater looked orange, her brown hair almost black. The frame rate was a choppy slideshow, her movements ghosting into trails of blocky pixels. The built-in microphone, a pinhole beneath the lens, captured every click of the hard drive and the distant hum of the furnace.
The thing in the circular was a Dynex DX-WC1. The price, $39.99, was the first thing my father noticed. He picked up the grainy, black-and-white newspaper photo. "Looks like a tiny robot frog." dynex pc camera
In 2011, we got a laptop. Then a smartphone with a front-facing camera. The Dynex was unplugged, its green eye going dark. It sat on the desk for a month before my father moved it to the "cable drawer," a limbo of old chargers and AOL installation CDs. We tested it on my mother