I have a Logitech C910 camera. It works fine with other applications (such as guvcview), but offers suboptimal experience with cheese or empathy. The problem is that there is no way to control the zoom level from cheese, and the default is too wide-angle for general use.

This problem of not having advanced controls applies to other cameras, too - e.g. sometimes it is necessary to adjust the "power line frequency" control for the camera in my laptop.

For Logitech C910, you can view the list of available v4l2 controls here: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-uvc-devel@lists.berlios.de/msg06040.html