Chat Fx

Chat Fx $20 is yet another fun product that works with iChat.

As they say on their web site; “ChatFX brings outstanding visual effects to iChat that are practical but also incredibly fun. Kids love seeing the bluescreen and other fun effects. Adults will find it makes video-conferencing a whole lot more entertaining and a lot less intimidating. Spice up your chats and make them more memorable with special effects like those seen only seen in movies and PhotoShop. Effects like bluescreen (which is capable of showing any movie, tv, video, or animation in the background of a video chat), twirl, comic book, alien, interrogation, pencil, vortex, dent, bump, bodyart, facepaint, fisheye, waking life, bubbles, mercury, on fire, ogre, sepia, sobel, xray, and many more, are included and any kind of special video effect can be created.”

As with many of these type of products, what initially looked like fun soon became a little tiresome, but I soon settled on a core set of landscapes that I was comfortable with. Every now and then it is still fun to switch to a new one, but I found that friends soon got a little fed up with that game.

I use iGlasses with iChat and I found that unless I had it set to normal I got quite a conflict, especially when iGlasses was set to extra bright. The blue/green screen needed a fair amount of fine tuning is well. No surprise with that (makes you realize what a nightmare professionals must have), but anybody expecting to be able to just install this application and use it is going to be a disappointed. In the same way, adding files, images etc to the landscape was a little more complicated than a simple “drag and drop”, you need to type in the path of the file you want.

None of this detracts from the fact that it is a clever, fun product to use – just don’t expect not to have to do some fine tuning. Adults may well find it less intimidating, once they have got the hang of setting it up that is.