web camera or else ? 15-30 fps processing of camera videos.

[Newbie]

I am doing some robotics projects but my main area of interest is
trying out several algorithms for the processing of the stream of data
coming from the video.

I am wondering what type of camera I should invest in. Either I could
buy a web cam and hope I can find a driver I could either modify or
use. i.e. every frame is somehow stored on the computer automagically
or I could buy a camera not unlike the AVRcam
(http://www.jrobot.net/Projects/AVRcam.html) or the CMUcam and try to
do the processing once the data has been streamed to the nearest
computer ? or should I use an expensive video card, some CCTV camera
and a frame grabber to digitize photos so they can be processed
afterwards. I expect my processing algorithms to handle at least 15
frames per second framerate once they are working ont the final set-up.

My constraints are that I would like to avoid as much as possible
complex set-ups even if that means buying a more expensive camera
set-up. For the prototyping, I would like to try my algorithms out
using a combination of python and matlab (all very slow) and then
expect the same architecture (image files location and flow) with
speedier set-up like python+psyco or C. All the processing would be
done on a computer dedicated for that. Windows or Linux are possible.

Any help from either comp.robotics.misc or c.l.p would be helpful.
Thanks in advance,

Jake.