Up Close & Personal With The Digital Cowboy

It sounds a little like a cut scene from Brokeback Mountain, but the Digital Cowboy is in fact a webcam.  Now before you pelt me with rotten fruit and shout "why is a webcam newsworthy, you stupid goose?!" in my face, let me draw your violent attention to the 7x optical zoom strapped to the front of it.

That's right, this is the ideal webcam for those people who a) like to look really closely at things far away, b) have small things they want to make look bigger when in video-conversations, or c) are allergic to WiFi and as such can't sit close to their computer, but who want to video-converse anyway.

It's a mere 1.3-megapixels, mind, so we're not looking at something that will replace any high-quality SLR lenses you might have to hand, but for $81 what can you expect?

The zoom lens is also removable, should you be sat right in front of the webcam and not want people to see up your nose.

Digital Cowboy [via Crave]