Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and I did some testing earlier this week with Skype's new High Quality Video feature. We also compared them to SightSpeed, whom is known for having excellent video quality. The results were a bit of a shock to me, actually.

Under the right conditions, Skype's High Quality Video kicks SightSpeed video quality to the curb. I was absolutely blown away at how good it looked-at 640x480 no less.

What are the right conditions? Based on conversations with Jonathan Christensen, Skype's General Manager for Audio and Video, not to mention Jim and I gawking over the technical call details, we were able to determine the following "right" conditions (Jim goes into more detail on Skype Journal):

• Skype 3.6 on Windows (though Skype 2.7 on the Mac also seems to work)
• Intel Core Duo Processor (Core2 or better preferred)
• Logitech Camera with Carl Zeiss Optics (9000 Pro, Pro for Notebooks)
• QuickCam software drivers version 11.5
• A sustained, bi-directional 384k of bandwidth between the endpoints

If you can meet those requirements, you can get 640x480 at 24 frames per second. Jim and I managed to get during most of our test calls. Even when we weren't getting 24 frames a second, anything above 15 frames a second looked great.

So, of course, after doing these calls on Skype, we switched over to SightSpeed. We could not get 640x480 video on SightSpeed (320x240), but we were getting consistent, 30 frames per second during our call. However, what really puzzled me is that SightSpeed was reading this Logitech camera differently than Skype. The video quality from the camera was terrible compared to what Skype was able to pull from the same camera on the same PC. Motion was ghosty on SightSpeed, whereas it was not on Skype.

Of course, this great video quality comes with a heafty CPU price. My test system is a Dell Precision 390 with 2 gigs of RAM and a Intel Core2 2.66Ghz processor. During the call, the CPU usage was somewhere around 45%. During the SightSpeed call, the CPU utilization was only around 10%.

All in all, I was impressed with the High Quality Video that came from Skype. It's not just marketing hype, it's the real deal. I've seen it for myself and I'm a believer.