If this is a regular USB Web camera implementing standard interfaces, you don't need to buy anything at all, everything is bundled with Windows API. Isn't that a good news?
This is how you can test it: first, download and run (not need to install, as I remember, those people are just nice :-)) VirtualDUB, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub[
^],
http://www.virtualdub.org/[
^].
Use "Capture feature" and make sure you can capture a still picture or video. If this program can detect the camera and do it, you can do the same in your code as well.
—SA
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