I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously.
The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt.
Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it would appear that owning something that could physically do what you want it to is only half the battle for numerous reasons, and in this case it would have been my government demanding extra money to 'unlock' this functionality.
Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...
There's also Converse that adds a piece of cloth to the soles of their sneakers to be able to classify them as slippers for "taxation purposes".
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-why-your-c...
Snuggies are "used" and not "worn" in their promotional materials, because it's better to be taxed as a blanket than a garment.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/02/snuggies-ar...
Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.
Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.
My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.
There was also the famous decision in the Jaffa Cake case where the VAT treatment depended on whether or not a Jaffa cake was a cake or a biscuit https://standrewseconomist.com/2023/12/31/let-them-eat-cake-...
The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.
This is akin to Fox News arguing in court that it is, in fact, entertainment and not news, despite it's name.
Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)
I think Steven Colbert hosted a show using himself as the host. I’m not sure about the tax implications though.
I'm not from the UK, but wasn't there also a cake Vs biscuits thing for tax reasons?
I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.
Hah.
Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.
Some trade war from the XIX century or something? Or maybe because dolls were historically thought for girls?
In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.
The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."
This. It’s a pretty reasonable answer to a stupid question. Dolls depict people.
Probably lobbying from a local doll maker
did you get a second glance? did you figure out why they are taxed differently?
Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.
This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.
The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.
You ought to see the magic they do when coding medical procedures for billing in the US. It makes these tax shenanigans look simple.
Why would jackets even be taxed differently than shirts. It's so silly.
I don't think I've ever seen that on any of my shirts here in the US. Is this in the US?
This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2
IIRC the PS3 Linux option existed because of this same tariff.
I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.
Or when the makers of Jaffa Cakes baked a giant 12 inch version[1] and brought it to the court to argue they were cakes and not biscuits to get lower VAT.
[1]: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-compan...
I wish supermarkets would put them on the cake aisle instead and keep the biscuit aisle pure.
I would eat that.
Which is fucking hilarious when you think that a lot of xmen storyline is about them wanting to be perceived as humans
Which legally probably also makes it a fairy tale
"It's a nice story and the court won't prevent you from telling it, but legally these beings in that story are clearly NOT humans"
Hilarious.
Pretty much fits. It probably wouldn't be such an issue if they were just human.
And also, they are an "on your face" depiction of the dehumanization of the Holocaust victims...
Sounds like Ford putting seats in the back of their vans so they could pay less tax when importing them from Mexico, then removing them before they're sold. Looks like they've now been fined, but they got away with it for a while.
This was also the reason for the (in)famous BRAT seats:
Technically the ones they got in hot water for were from EU to get around the Chicken Tax.
A bunch of fun articles around these areas in the UK (free to read, think you might need an account though - apologies). Two food and one toy:
https://www.ft.com/content/5af5b182-349a-4a25-b4fb-4551908f2...
https://www.ft.com/content/a6a54008-6059-4052-99ae-282f148f2...
https://www.ft.com/content/a8d6413e-1184-4f89-9bcb-4f6cb8d7a...
FT Alphaville is such an excellent column
I wonder if there is any place where one can look up all these sort of creative legal-tax shenanigan stories. They are so fun and such an interesting lens to see what _is_ via this interlinked, case-specific web of events.
The book is called Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43805741-daylight-robber...
When Trump set a tariff on German optics because he was mad at Germany, Leica had a workaround as well.
Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.
So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".
The tax system is over complicated! Why the distinction between toys and dolls?
Regulatory capture most likely
Thanks, amazing story! I found this nice coverage of the events: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/92007/why-us-federal-cou...
In universe, arguing the X-Men are not human would put you firmly in the villain category.
exactly, that was core to the whole plot; oppressed mutants fighting to have their basic human rights recognized.
Capitalists? in the villain category? Impossible!
This has interesting implications for the Marvel canon, as the conflict between average humans and mutants is a primary plot driver for x-men
> Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human
Isn't that true though?
Was their lawyer William Stryker?
That requirement is reversed in the last five years IIRC. My Sony A7-III doesn't have that, for example. Neither modern Canons, AFAIK.
The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box.
So if you are going to use your camera for production which you'll earn money, you need to pay commercial licenses for your cameras.
Hah.
> The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box.
Do you have a link? Could only find a 2010 article[1] that appears to have been debunked by MPEG-LA themselves (per the updates in the blog post).
[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/23236/why-our-civilizations-vid...
Of course. Below a selection of some user manuals, with the texts copied verbatim.
From Nikon D500 User Manual [0], page 22:
From Nikon Z6/Z7 User Manual [1], page 236:
Sony has a similar note for A9 [3], but can be grouped under here, which is almost the same:
AVC Patent Portfolio License: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/ OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND / OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. S EE http://www.mpegla.com
From Canon R5 User Manual [2], page 939:
“This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.”
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (''AVC VIDEO'') AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
[0]: https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive3/4qUKV00WD5Bh04RdeC...
[1]:https://download.nikonimglib.com/archive5/8Yygr00R9Ojb058Kwq...
[2]: https://cam.start.canon/en/C003/manual/c003.pdf
[3]: https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/1830/v1/en/contents/TP0002351...
Hilarious. Reminds me of Pioneer CDJs as well, even on the flagship CDJ-3000 models. If you read the user manual it says:
> About using MP3 files
> This product has been licensed for nonprofit use. This product has not been licensed for commercial purposes (for profit-making use), […]. You need to acquire the corresponding licenses for such uses. For details, see […]
Best use an open audio codec instead.
Nowadays, MP3 is an open audio codec. The patents have expired.
> Best use an open audio codec instead.
You will still need a separate license (or multiple separate licenses) for commercial purposes.
Music licensing is unbelievably complicated
Do you need to sign an agreement to this effect before starting filming? I don't see how it can legally hold.
Nominally, yes. These are checked before your movie is being distributed, and you'll most probably face legal consequences if you don't pay for your licenses.
Not getting caught for some time doesn't count either. You'll pay retroactively, with some interest, probably.
Licensing page is at [0]. Considering the previous shenanigans they pulled against open video and audio formats in the past [1], these guys are not sleeping around. These guys call people for patent pools in a format, and license these pools as format licenses.
[0]: https://www.via-la.com/licensing-2/avc-h-264/avc-h-264-licen...
We need to normalize piracy like we're cheap Chinese knockoff manufacturers. Down with software patents.
Wipe the EXIF data on the images when you make it public and nobody will be the wiser ;)
I’m not sure. Like how color printers write their serial numbers and date and whatnot on every page, these devices might be watermarking every video subtly, and we might not know it.
That's fine, as long as I can record long movies with my iPhone.
But is it a phone that records movies or a movie recorder that can make phone calls?
[I jest, but these were almost literally the questions being asked by various commissions]
If your camera is compatible with magiclantern you could lift that limit and add some really cool features:
I’ve come across this before and think it’s brilliant. Are you aware of any comparable firmware for Nikon users (not that I really have any complaints about what Nikon has provided, but this is likely a case of not knowing what I’m missing out on)?
I'm not, and that's the reason why I went Canon. There is also CHDK for cheaper Canon cameras. Canon seems to be less litigous when it comes to hacking their firmware.
This vaguely reminds me of the fact that in many countries, pure ethanol sold for industrial purposes is intentionally made poisonous, so you can’t drink it and thus merchants don’t have to charge the taxes on it that they would for spirits.
It's more like "so you can't drink it" without the taxes part. Those taxes play important role in reducing alcohol consumption (though they are of course not the only tool), so making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy rather than opens a loophole in taxation.
E.g. study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3860576/
Every legal allowance I disagree with is a "loophole", every legal allowance I take advantage of is intended functionality.
> making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy
I have never seen this as anything other than the death penalty for evading taxes. If the tax were designed to reduce consumption across the population, it needs to scale with income or net worth. Otherwise, it's just a tax on the poor.
I’m not sure how this is different from what I’m saying?
Couldn't they just make it taste bad, for safety's sake?
FWIW, many countries no longer allow denaturing via poisonous agents, just via extremely unpleasant tasting ones (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium).
I heat my house with oil, a truck comes every couple of months and fills a massive tank in my back yard.
This "oil" is basically diesel. It smells and feels identical to diesel. But it's about 70 cents cheaper per litre compared to road diesel. It's dyed red, and you are not supposed to put it in your car, but I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines.
The red diesel is not taxed like road diesel, and is much cheaper.
Here, that's commonly called red diesel (despite them changing to green decades ago) and it's sold for agricultural use. There are a number of cross border smuggling operations where criminals remove the dye and resell it for somewhere between the two prices.
Though primarily done to trucks, there are occasional fuel tests done by police. Even if your tank is currently clean, they'll occasionally pull out the fuel filters and check those for dye.
> I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines
There's always the risk of getting your fuel tank dipped if you're on road. Moreso for trucks, but some jurisdictions will set up inspections and check for dyed fuel and tear you an absolute new one when they catch it.
In Germany, all storage products (e.g. USB sticks) have to pay a canon "because you could use it to pirate media". Now, if I pre-paid the canon for pirating, does it mean I'm authorized to?
In Belgium, the same tax is raised by Auvibel for private copying. It allows us, in theory, to make copies of everything (except sheet music) that we acquired legally, even if we don't have access to the original anymore. So lending anything from a library or a friend, and making and keeping a copy is fair game.
Still not a fan, and probably the EUCD makes most of this useless.
You're expected to! I think we could even calculate exactly how much.
Funnily enough, I have actually used the 30 minute limit as a "feature" on my Panasonic Lumix G80 (the cousin to the unrestricted G85) as sometimes I would want to set up my camera and leave it recording for 20-30 minutes while I walked away to do things but wouldn't physically be able to return to switch it off. It would save me battery and SD card space because it automatically stops after 30 minutes.
That reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/
Sometimes there are hidden menus or settings that might allow you to toggle those features. I used to work on TVs and we had a secret menu that toggles various features. Some of those features would be disabled for specific countries (mainly for patents)
That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :)
I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
More or less all tariffs and sales tax systems are like this; the rules are _always_ kind of all over the place.
My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.)
There's also the famous Jaffa Cake case, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status , but I think the Subway one has an extra element of absurdity because it went all the way to the _Supreme Court_.
Importantly, Subway bread is not bread for tax purposes. For food standards purposes, it is.
> My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread
Because it is not. Cola is not water either.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
This issue does not appear weird.
There is some legally technical difference between a video camera and a still photo camera. Probably different tariffs or something. Not weird at all and it is not uncommon anywhere in the world for different classes och products to be classified differently, infallibly because of industry lobbyism to reduce their costs or to reduce their prices for their specific product.
The manufacturer chose to limit the product for the consumer for their own economic benefit. Nothing is stopping them from playing ball except their own profit motive.
So American and Asian consumers can pay the same price for the same device that can do more, but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?
It is I the customer who will pay the tariffs (they are always paid by the importer) - the manufacturer gets the same amount per unit.
The very raison-d'être of the EU is to remove all tarriffs between 20+ countries.
Without the EU, there would be a worse patchwork of rules and exceptions.
Patchworks of rules and exceptions can be beneficial. It allows for experimentation and/or competition as well as the fact that regulations can often enough not keep up with change and they can be more entrenched if done at a higher level. Where, when, and what is better harmonized across a whole market VS allowing variation is a matter of debate.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
That is an acceptable position and you will likely nor require further investigation as long as the criticism remains vague and is offset by positive sentiment. I too love the EU.
I have a family member of retirement age who got into the habit of anonymously expressing their love of the EU in the comments section of a local newspaper.
After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.
I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
Tariffs around the world have weird stuff like that. Very little to do with the EU itself. Expect a lot more weird things like that to happen in the US now with the new US government implementing new tariffs.
This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access - like copying the CDs you already bought to your phone. Compared to what we used to pay on blank media it's not so bad. If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
I reject this view of the law completely at least in Portugal. The law was introduced to add a tax to every storage media one can purchase with the premise that a percentage of that storage media will be used for what they call piracy. This in effect means everyone is assumed to be breaking the law in advance and paying for it in advance.
As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?
> This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access
Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?
> blank media
But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.
> the alternative is that you are not allowed
But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything
The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.
Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.
In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.
The alternative should be that you can backup the stuff you own for free.
> music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s
Huh? It may have dipped at the time Netflix had everything streamable, but there's been a resurgence in the now years since it hasn't.
It may have been a customs and taxation issue here, but manufacturers are constantly adding costs of their own onto software before often reversing track.
Examples: Leica (for Fotos) charged a princely sum for various trifles before removing these fees.
Naim: charged £35 for the control app - which I paid - before going free, and now the app is the only way to control whole swathes of their increasingly-execrable hardware.
These two companies’ kit is expensive, luxury, premium, however you want to refer to it, and so they probably felt comfortable wringing their customers a little more. Probably understandable in the case of Leica owners who will pay £250 for a viewfinder dioptre correction lens (puts hand up again) but less so for hifi owners.
It is not that audiophiles haven’t been shown to spent inordinate sums on the dumbest, snakiest, oiliest tat this side of an Oxford Street souvenir shop, but it has to be material and palpable.
It’s somewhat subjective, but I disagree it’s easier to fleece photographers than audiophiles. There are professional art photographers that use Leica cameras because they’re great, and $250 is pocket change for a lot of serious optical equipment. Look at the Canon L lenses and the like. Lots of people that buy that stuff don’t need it, but it’s not expensive solely for the sake of being expensive.
I have yet to find a professional sound engineer, producer, or artist that calls themself an audiophile or uses the insanely overpriced gear marketed to them. Lots of that stuff is demonstrably bullshit and only valuable because it’s expensive.
That tariff difference between "video" and "stills" cameras having a 30 minute cutoff is funny. If you think about the vast majority of the time when shooting moving video with a handheld or tripod mounted camera it does not involve 30+ minute long continuous takes. You could have a professional movie camera with that restriction and it wouldn't be a problem in the vast majority of cases.
So the restriction ends up being between things like security cameras, vtc cameras, and traffic cameras vs all other times of cameras. The relatively shitty camera in a doorbell or on your dashboard end up being more expensive to import than the fancy DSLR just because it is used in a different application.
There was a custom ROM for canon available quite a few years ago... Now all I can find is https://www.magiclantern.fm/ but I believe the previous one was called CHDK or something like that
Got it only in German here: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Hack_Development_Kit and on fandom.wiki there's a page ... But I used it like hundreds of years ago so not sure if it still works...
CHDK is what came to mind for me too. I used to make great time lapses with it. 10/10 software.
It looks like they have firmware for the G5 X, but not the G5 X 2. :/
From my memory CHDK was a project for Canon's consumer/point-and-shoot cameras, and Magic Lantern is for the DSLRs.
>I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously.
My (now ancient) Canon 5D mk2 is limited to ~28 minutes of video due to file system limitations.
Is the limitation the same regardless of quality, format, frame rate, etc? That would make me suspicious.
No, 4GB equates to around 28mins of encoded video with their bitrate settings.
There's the well-known case of Spain in 1985, that would impose a tariff on computers with 64 KB RAM or less. At that time, Amstrad launched the CPC 464 with 64KB worldwide, but for Spain launched the special model CPC 472, wich had a daughter board with an additional 8Kb chip not connected to the main RAM and thus unusable, but enough for circumventing the tariff. That tariff was short-lived.
I wonder if 3rd party camera firmware will become more of a thing - e.g. https://www.magiclantern.fm/ or https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK
Do you know of anything equivalent for Nikon?
The problem wasn't canon? Sounds like the problem was canon...trying to make more money.
I think the time limit is because of the way the imports are classified.
I believe that under 30 minutes, allows it to be a digicam, but over, requires it to be classified as a video camera.
Most pros generally take scenes as groups of short runs, so that doesn't matter (Canon is used extensively in professional entertainment).
This happens even outside electronics and software. I ordered some tevas recently to replace my old ones and discovered they now have a light felt layer over the rubber bottom. If I had to guess its like the converse reason of adding a similar felt layer: to classify them as slippers.
I seem to recall that there is a special button sequence you can use on Canon cameras that disabled the restriction. It’s. Been many years, but Google should have something for your model.
> I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously
Large sensors optimized for still photography overheat when operating continuously for video, so they feature safety limits. Sensor heat dissipation is a big problem and a major differentiating feature of top end cinema cameras.
My Sony doesn’t have this length limit, but will readily overheat and turn off after several minutes of highest-bitrate recording. So no, overheating is trivially protected against via temperature sensors, not some arbitrary timeout.
Taxes Rule Everything Around Me
One of the obvious "wtf?" things about this regulation is that regulators believe 29 minutes of video doesn't qualify as video?
It would likely overheat anyway hah. Old Sony cameras have the same restrictions.
No, this is not the reason. If the camera records video for more than 30min, then it is a video camera, see the question answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640107
In short, there is no good reason anymore, but originally this was because of EU import tarifs.
GP didn’t claim that’s not the reason. They’re making a joke that if the camera kept recording past 30min, it would overheat.
It’s a joke.
Silly restrictions aside, I feel that most use cases don't have takes longer than 30min anyway (I mean, on cameras that you actually start and stop recording manually)
But yeah technology evolves and the taxes remain. (Though don't complain too much or they will just pick the higher taxes for the newer cameras)
I can’t see why you think there’s a usecase for 25 minute videos but not 35 minute ones.
Speaking as an amateur photographer with multiple DSLRs: I’ve certainly needed longer than that for a number of gigs.
Camera manufacturers can just enable the functionality as an easter-egg.
So they just publish some activation code on some consumer forum somewhere and from then on it's the consumer's responsibility.
I think they did the same thing with DVD region restrictions.
Streaming is a major use case where the camera may be recording continuously for several hours at a time. Another one is for video meetings, though in that case I’d prefer it if my camera forced the end of the meeting after 30 mins.
Reminds me of the Indian public discourse when the government wanted to tax caramel popcorn in movie theatres at 18% when the normal ones were taxed at 5%.
But the EU doesn’t do tariffs? I thought that was exclusive to the incoming US administration, because it’s stupid.
Yes it does. You have a customs desk at every entry port, complete with a “goods to declare” sign. If you buy stuff online, you’ll also have to pay up if the products are taxed.
You can learn about those here: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs-4/calculation-...
We also have VAT (sales tax) which is levied on top of the import duties (so the tax is taxed).
There are even restrictions on the quantities of some products you are allowed to carry between member states, such as alcohol and tobacco, mostly because taxes on those vary by jurisdiction.
That's reminds me when I was in South East Asia a few years back and wanted to do some time lapse or series photography with my Sony Alpha a7ii. A camera that I had paid close to 2k€ for (just body, no glass).
It required an app to be installed on the camera that was paid-for. Which in term required the camera to be connected to a WiFi.
Imagine discovering this while on a trip in the jungle or the desert or whatever ...
It was a one time purchase (I think around 10€) but it was still a complete wtf.
You had to purchase the app through the camera's app store. You read right.
Ofc this failed as my CC was declined because I live in Germany and the transaction got marked as suspicious, coming from SEA.
So I had to go to town and hunt down a wifi USB dongle so I could turn my laptop into a WiFi hotspot for the camera, while using the VPN masking the built-in WiFi to be connected to a German IP.
You had to enter the CC details through the camera's on-screen keyboard that was operated with the joystick on the camera's body. It took me a good ten minutes.
No words.
Thankfully people have figured out how to add apps to some sony cameras https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE
It's the same thing, one is just the out of box locked down Sony app-store controlled version, and this is the somewhat liberated side loading & build chain. It's some kind of Android layer running atop the base camera.
> It is possible to develop custom Android apps for supported cameras. Keep in mind that they should be compatible with Android 2.3.7.
https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE?tab=readme-ov-file#wha...
I wish Samsung had had better success with their Android native powered cameras (as opposed to the thin shell Sony grafted atop), had decided to stay around. Cellphones have amazing & fantastic photo apps available, where-as the professional systems baked into cameras emphasizes post-production tools for computational photography. Being able to have app devs everywhere making your digital camera better & more usable should be such an obvious priority.
And the earlier Alpha cameras with their Android based shim they could run kind of got this. Sony did announce a new SDK 3 years ago for some of their highest end cameras, but it's a simpler remote-control only SDK. https://alphauniverse.com/stories/sony-announces-new-camera-...
Didn‘t know about this project - you just have to love the open source concept
Heh, your experience is not isolated. I needed the timelapse app when I was several days deep into Algonquin park in northern Ontario. I had barely a bar of service, so I had to hoist my phone up a tree with a rope to get enough data that I could tether the camera to it. Thanks Sony.
Wow, I had the exact same experience with a Sony Alpha 6. Also used a laptop to VPN back home ...
Sony wanted something like 500USD to unlock 4k on my prosumer video camera. Kinda insane.
It required an app to be installed on the camera that was paid-for.
Apple had a similar situation once. I was among the thousands of people who paid Apple something like $10 to get a CD-ROM in the mail containing a single CODEC for something video-related.
Sorry for being vague, it was way back in the early days of OS X, so I can't remember exactly what the situation was. But I do know I still have the file in my archive, as I ran across it a few weeks ago.
Apple used to sell prorec and Sorenson stuff. Usually you could get them with a QuickTime pro license, final cut license, or similar
The MPEG2 codec was also a paid download (I think it was also included with DVD Studio Pro)
Sony’s software is still terrible… but fwiw they have built in timelapse functionality in their cams since the A7 III released in 2018.
That does sound completely absurd.
How many people buy apps on their high end camera? Doesn’t sound like it was worth developing an App Store for it.
Back in 2010 the app store was the hot new thing and everyone had visions of how they would put on in their product. Most of them realized it was a stupid idea before they got around to writing code for it (much less release), but some of it escaped to the public.
Sometimes the idea of apps might make sense (this is arguable, but lets not go there) but the old buy it on a real computer (phone allowed) and then load it is correct.
The only app I’ve ever used with a camera was the Panasonic app on my GH5 for a shoot because it gave you full remote control of the settings/focus and monitoring (for free!) I find most apps for cameras are not necessary and often buggy but I get why some folks like them
I had a Panasonic GF1, which couldn't do timelapses as well (there was no such thing as apps for that camera, only firmware hacks). What I did was to buy a remote shutter release that had a timer and other functions, which allowed me to do so much more.
That's pretty wild for such a popular brand.
My panasonic G9 just has that stuff built in.
Not that unusual for Sony.
They have a lot of WTF product design decisions.
I have a running joke with friends about how there must be some terrible engineer who is the CEO's son or something that gets to design one feature in every product.
It's part of the enshittification cycle. I'd been a Nikon camera user and figured I'd upgrade...reviewing Nikon, Cannon and Sony, the new startup...Sony was the only body at that pricepoint that also had a motor in the body to let older class have auto-focus...that was a feature the other two were gatekeeping at higher priced bodies.
Now that they're established, its time to chip away and add shareholder value.
The classic walled garden approach - make everyone buy lense mounts that only fit their cameras, people collect lenses for their brand of choice, then make them regret ever making the purchase by racking up subscription costs and introducing 3rd party spyware to sell your data. Sunk cost fallacy makes people eat shit because they're already too deep. Capitalism at it's finest.
Welcome to the Enshitocene
As William Shakespeare said, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the MBAs".
That is absurd and annoying - you might prefer to just get a USB remote shutter release for future work.
Ha. That made me laugh.
Pentax cameras are much better at the ui and do not have any of this shit. They are also bulletproof and nearly indestructible, favoured by war photographers, and tend to have excellent spec sheets (if a bit of a a slow autofocus).
The company went bankrupt and bought by Ricoh, which I sincerely hope will keep the brand alive. Capitalism does really seem to prefer the nickel and dime approach...
> (if a bit of a a slow autofocus).
Sony's killer feature is (or was at some point) amazingly fast autofocus, which is very useful when photographing animals in the jungle.
Ricoh still hasn't made a non-fixed-lens mirror-less. They're behind. OTOH that GRIIIx…
The penny-fucking behaviour of huge organization in parallel of pushing at you unwanted (actually obstructing) messages in various ways, email, pop-ups and tootip suggestions and advices, CI/CD pushed on the user on a prominent way are repelling. In parallel to the rubbish web presence not working reliably or at all, far from being easy for clients but usually having bells and whistles for distraction. I saved quite a bit of money thinking twice if I want to be abused by products made for the benefit of the organization mainly. Sometimes with side benefits for the user, but that is more like coincidence, side effect of addressing the organization's needs. Less and less point buying consumer products if it just makes your life similarly difficult, not better.
I thought it's weird to have "fillérbaszó" to have such a direct english counterpart, but then I checked your username :)
; )
The thing is, nobody cares.
As long as consumers keep making uneducated choices and companies keep copying one another, that's what we will be getting, and honestly, that's what we deserve.
After all, people watch "reviews" of video gear on YouTube (pretty much all "reviewers" get the gear for free and then pretend they are objective). These "reviewers" use the gear for all of several hours before making the video and forgetting about the gear. But that's what people base their buying decisions on.
And then, "competition" doesn't exist, because companies seem to be hell-bent on copying one another's idiotic ideas. Everybody is afraid to take a bolder step and make something different because, you know, next quarter's profits, and bonuses.
So, nobody cares.
Louis Rossmann is putting together a Consumer Action Task Force. If people care, now would be a good time to show it.
You're assuming that these practices are actually beneficial in any way on the market. That's a fallacy. Just because a company is making money, doesn't mean they are making good products.
Where do you get that idea? It's in no way implied in GP's comment. These practices don't have to benefit the company at all. GP is just saying, as long as enough people keep buying despite the practices, then the practices will continue.
The revenue boost you get from this dumb shit is easily measurable and attributable. “Let’s charge our existing customers $5 for some nonsense” -> bigger bonus that year.
The long term revenue hit you get from pissing off your customers is nearly impossible to measure or attribute.
Occasionally you’ll see a company where the leadership believes in the long term value of not doing this crap. They might do pretty well as a result. (Fans would point to Apple as a huge example, YMMV.) But even with an example to imitate, the incentives are almost impossible to overcome, especially since your revenue story will get worse before it gets better if you change course. And those rare good companies are vulnerable to change in leadership that takes them down the bad path.
> The long term revenue hit you get from pissing off your customers is nearly impossible to measure or attribute.
As people become accepting of this practice I worry there won't be a long-term hit.
Tech consumers don't understand what kind of services actually warrant a subscription because there's a recurring cost to the provider (renting CPU or storage capacity) versus those that are just rent seeking (ahem-- "recovering development costs").
I was heartened when mainstream media was up-in-arms over auto manufacturers trying to charge monthly fees for features like heated seats or remote start. I worry that consumers can't identify those kinds of gouging behavior with technology and will just accept and normalize these practices.
> As long as consumers keep making uneducated choices and companies keep copying one another, that's what we will be getting, and honestly, that's what we deserve.
So true! So sad!
Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed from the HDMI-out in the camera? Most decent capture cards also expose themselves as cameras to almost all applications. This is my setup, and it works perfectly. Nikon D7500 as a webcam. More professional setups use Atomos monitors with built-in NVMe drives mounted directly to the camera.
I generally find the camera manufacturers' in-house programs absolutely terrible. Nikon's webcam utility is free[1], but has significant limitations over the capture card setup. Likewise for Sony. Both have considerable resolution and framerate limits, and I'd rather feed a 4K 60 FPS stream into my meeting program and let it handle the compression than have an XGA 1024×768 15 FPS output from the camera.
[1]: https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products/548/Webca...
This is hugely dependent on whether the camera supports clean HDMI output - that is, without overlays. My Canon camera for example insists on showing a focus square over HDMI no matter what, and it is impossible to disable.
You can remove it by installing magic lantern. It lets me use my old 650D as a second camera.
Unfortunately there is no port of ML to my specific model. I did some porting work myself by running the camera firmware in QEMU, but to be able to run it on hardware I apparently needed some signing key that only the Magic Lantern lead dev has. By the time I was doing all of this he was busy with real world stuff so ultimately I just borrowed a friend's Nikon camera.
ML doesn't work on a lot of cameras - yet. It's quite far behind the last generation of SLRs and stays away from the flagship models.
The particular camera he's talking about, the G5 X Mark II, does support clean HDMI out. I used to use it as my webcam.
> Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed?
This is how I've used my Sony camera since COVID. It works great.
I wasn't sure at first if OP was trying to do something nonstandard, because you get video to your computer with a video cable. Plus a way for your computer to capture that, which for me is CamLink.
Honestly, I'm surprised there's a relevant manufacturer app at all. Not surprised that it costs money.
This is a bit like not having power in your home to charge your camera with and asking the manufacturer for a generator. They may have a solution, but the price will be bad.
OP wants to just use the USB cable, which makes sense for me.
USB 2.0, that bog standard version from 2000 that is assumed to be the lowest common denominator possible for any new hardware...
Edit: 4am math correction...
480Mbit/sec transfer; Uncompressed, that's ~333333 pixels per frame for 60FPS. Not even considering overhead, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class 1.1 support from 2005 includes Motion JPEG (low compression, all patents probably expired given it was developed in the 90s) and MPEG2 (also sufficiently old, to be unencumbered now).
However, if they'd use USB 3.0 ~ 5gbps, ideally over a USB-C port, the connection would be more modern, and easily able to handle even 4K video with now free from patents and well supported compression algorithms.
Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?
OP expects the camera comes with some decent convenience at that price.
OP is using a camera as a webcam that's not sold as a webcam. That's fine, I do the same with mine, but it's also fine of the manufacturer to allow for that by simply providing A/V interfaces instead of trying to account for every use case.
Convenience is always extra
Exactly. But why does he need to buy a USB capture card and HDMI cable? He can just hire someone to come and record the videos for him. They'll also do the post processing.
Why does he even even record the videos himself? He can just hire actors to do what he wants, probably a lot better.
And what's the whole thing with buying a camera? He should just buy a studio and hire a crew to manage all that stuff.
Buying usb capture cards is a standard accessory for content creators. It's not a big deal.
Not a big deal at all.
The outrage in this thread is incredible. Buying a couple A/V adapters to adapt a non-webcam camera into a webcam is somehow seen as a terrible burden.
If someone doesn't want to do that, perhaps they should buy...a webcam. No adapters needed.
A camera comes with more power at the cost of simplicity for this use case.
This is what's called a slippery slope.
A capture card and HDMI cable together cost less than $100. Hiring someone will be at least an order of magnitude more expensive—and more so the more people you hire.
Whoosh.
That was the entire point of the comment, to point out the slippery slope in the HDMI/cable card argument in the first place.
You don't even need OBS for this - capture cards show up as digital cameras in macOS
You do, capture cards introduce latency something around 30-50ms (at least the cheaper ones) and if you are using non built in mic you need to resync everything up.
Indeed.
Would this approach also give you control of camera settings? I think the OP's situation, he wanted that.
How easy and slick this setup will be depends on the camera.
For example, my camera can't operate and charge over USB at the same time, so you need a supplemental power supply. And it won't autofocus continuously or keep the exposure and white balance stable unless you're recording a video. And videos can only be so long.
So I've got a HDMI-to-USB converter, a special HDMI cable, a special power brick and adaptor, a special tripod so all those cables don't pull the whole setup over, and I've got to restart video recording every 30 minutes or so, and wipe the microsd card regularly.
Your camera's probably better suited to this than mine :)
I've been using a Sony mirrorless (anything above a5100 will work) for over 6 years now; it needed a "dummy battery", and an HDMI capture card (about $25 for noname brands, or $80+ for Elgato, BlackMagic etc). It auto-focuses, doesn't write to microsd, and works flawlessly.
Even if you aren't buying Elgato, you can use Elgato's compatibility page to know which cameras work well: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/s/cam-link-camera-check
A word of warning on capture cards: I first bought a no-name off Amazon, thinking to save money. The video quality was abysmal. Artifacts everywhere.
I returned it and got an Elgato, which has worked great from day one.
Same setup here, down to the brand.
For those who don't know, the dummy battery is a power cable with a battery-shaped adapter that plugs in where the battery would go to provide continuous power.
What camera do you have? Why can't it autofocus when its not recording?
I believe you, but thats very silly.
I can force my (canon) camera to autofocus while not recording but usually you want to avoid that. It really hits the battery because the lens is permanentely adjusting.
Most mirrorless cameras a hybrids and you usually do not need this feature while takting stills.
None of my stills cameras focused continuously out of the box, probably to save power (moving potentially heavy lens elements around requires energy). My Olympus mirrorless can be told to focus all the time, but it's not the default.
They -can-, they just don't, unless you specifically enable it for power reasons.
No offense, but this sounds like a terrible camera for your use case. It sounds like you know that.
My Sony that I've been using as a webcam since COVID can do that, and it was 6 years old when I bought it. Upgrade when you can!
To be fair, I also have the dummy battery + HDMI capture + desktop clamp mount + live view faff for my D7500, but once you set it up it's just... there. I don't need to fiddle with it much further. It's a bit of a cable mess but I intend to upgrade to the Z6iii together with an upgrade to a desktop (so I can have a PCIe capture card), which will cut down the number of dongles all over.
Sure. I can do anything. It's the principle of the thing.
The principle is to use the right tool for the job.
USB can do just about anything. Video out is one possibility. But HDMI can already do that.
It doesn't make sense to expect the manufacturer to provide a free app to make USB do something you can already do over HDMI, and for which HDMI is intended.
This article is rage bait where there's no real cause for outrage. But it's adjacent enough to "right to repair" and "subscription fatigue" that it sounds outrageous.
The right too for the job most certainly is not HDMI.
The video feed should (depending on usecase, sure) be compressed on the device and sent over USB.
Sending uncompressed video just to be badly compressed in a capture device is most definitely not the right tool for the job.
This is exactly what I do. I'm also confused by this article...
It's rage bait. People hate subscriptions, understandably so, and people without A/V experience might expect a camera not sold as a webcam to easily double as a webcam since they both can capture video.
It's just a really poor reason to be outraged at Canon (or Sony or any of the other companies whose non-webcam cameras don't seamlessly turn into webcams without some standard A/V adapters).
Canon's webcam software was until recently free. It was the sole reason I bought a Cabin camera. This is a rug pull.
> a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable
Are there any USB-connectable capture devices that can process 4K?
Everything I see tries really hard to hide the fact that while they can input 4K, they can only produce 1920x1080.
Elgato Cam Link 4K
Oh, good to know! I didn't manage to find this one. But this one is $100 in the US, and $120 in some other places. Which is quite a bit of additional money to pay on top of your camera, which already has USB and should just provide a video stream there…
(this dongle is also USB-A, unfortunately)
I’ve been using this with a Fuji XT4 for last 2 years as webcam, working great. Though for stuff like google meet, I usually set it to 1080p 60fps since that’s the max res most meeting software will accept anyways, and frame rate is more important for live meeting than res.
At least with my camera the feed is low resolution and has the on screen overlays on it.
I mean why invest $70 (and a lot of ressources) in hardware when, in theory, you have everything you need, the software is just locked behind a paywall?
But you generally don't have everything you need. As I've mentioned most cameras' USB webcam output (if at all present) is quite bad, even via the official programs or gphoto. The 'correct' way to access video output is through their, well, video-out port (usually HDMI), which almost necessitates a capture card or monitor.
Evidently these cameras are capable of exporting high quality video via USB, if you pay 5 bucks a month. This doesn't sound like a hardware problem. It also has a control channel, unlike HDMI.
The fact that its a subscription is what really rubs me up the wrong way. Not everything deserves to be a subscription. Why is everything a subscription these days?
The reason for subscriptions is because we've applied a debt based financial model to everything. And for whatever reason customers do not understand the model and how bad they're getting screwed.
$100 of one time purchase software is approximately $5-10 per year of recurring revenue. And so if they can convince you that $5 a month is "not bad" then you're effectively outlaying $1000 for the software. In return you do get massive flexibility like, say, using the software for 1 month and then never again.
Some of it is due to inflation, we'd choke if we saw the real capital cost.
a quick google suggests that maybe Black Ops Cold War (2020): Over $700 million in development costs, 30 million copies sold. Thats $23 just in dev, not marketing and distribution, operation of the servers etc. Whereas black ops 3 was about $10 a copy, but sold for $60. Most of us would balk at paying ~$140 for a game, but that's roughly the inflationary pressures.
Anyways long story, I dont like subscriptions either, but I also dont want to lay down $100s on a piece of software I might not use in a month's time, especially if there wasnt a free trial for me to confirm it's not total crap.
Don't forget the fact that, uh, you can't get away from it. Please stop blaming customers for this. Literally nobody wants it this way, we just have no power to change it. What are we supposed to do, just never buy cameras or cars or software or computers ever again?
The broader question of why companies are able to keep pushing us ever closer to the maximum we’d conceivably be willing to pay for a given good, is probably best answered with “we stopped trust-busting a few decades ago, so competition sucks and keeps getting worse”.
The goal is to collect rent.
Find arbitrary reasons to justify squeezing customers on a regular basis. Customers are treated as assets. Often, but not exclusively, via software based subscriptions.
Because people pay them. If we refused to pay them and bought similar or even worse alternatives out of spite, they wouldn't exist.
This wasn't true the first time America was ruled by monopolies, and it isn't true now.
Last cycle everyone thought adding an App Store to their product would bring developers out of the wood work to make them money.
Just envy at the big players and hope for that sweet recurring revenue.
The one metric that matters: Annual Recurring Revenue
>Why is everything a subscription these days?
Software showed the world the incredible value of everyone being a renter instead of an owner.
Ironically HN (as an ad for Ycombinator) exists largely to enforce that new paradigm
So that company don't have to make new products to get your money but print money forever, milk the cow to the last drop.
When interest rates were near zero it was necessary for inflation resistant portfolio growth.
If you're serious, it's called rent-seeking behavior, and it is an extractive component of modern financialism.
One solution is to make a law that says it's illegal, and then enforce that law, ideally with harsh penalties so executives and companies can't get away with it.
I hope this helps!
> and they should—due to the lack of standards—provide software that allows you to use their cameras as intended.
There is a standard:
Yes, the articles complaints (no free way to use it as a webcam, 30 minute limits etc.) doesn't seem to apply to many camera brands apart from Canon.
And Canon's marketshare has been declining for years
https://www.mpb.com/en-uk/content/latest-from-mpb/2024-chall...
Sony encourages their use for vlogging/youtube because that's a huge market and let's you plug in HDMI to your computer without using special software
It doesn't apply to Canon's recent cameras either. The R1, R5 Mark II, R6 Mark II, R8, and R50 have built-in UVC support now.
devil's advocate, but this is not "using the cameras as intended". This is a camera for photography, I don't think a common person would see it and think "this is intended as a webcam".
On the one hand, perhaps this fixed software should be a one-time purchase and not a subscription. However, if this software was provided for free, what incentive would the management at Cannon have for investing into updating the software for MacOS when it inevitably breaks? I think there is a small subset of users using this camera as a webcam, and frankly I'm surprised Cannon even has an official app.
And this is probably because Canon corporate won't justify a budget for developing this software unless they expect separate revenue for it, even though it's clearly just value-add to the (already very expensive) hardware.
Bit of a weird argument considering you can use other brand cameras as webcams without any third party software. At least, all my Sony cameras can just be plugged in using USB and it works immediately. No drivers required.
Are you sure? The article talks about using it as a webcam and none of the Sony gear I've used supports that (A6500, A7 I/RI/II/SII/III/RIII/SIII).
They did make the "Imaging Edge Webcam" program, I think some time during the pandemic, but AFAIK it's just a PTP preview to webcam driver, so the quality is pretty terrible and you can do that with OBS+gphoto2.
A7RV + A6700 here. If you plug in a USB cable, it shows the usual "usb selection screen", but it includes a "USB streaming" option. It works immediately, flawlessly, on windows and macOS. For remote shooting, there's still the "PC remote" option.
My older Sony cameras (A6300 is my newest "old" Sony camera) don't have the feature (unless you use that terrible software you mentioned) Im surprised to read that even the reasonably modern A7SIII doesn't support it. It must be one of the last models without USB streaming support.
It reminds me a little of the time Apple charged $2 for a WiFi driver update, claiming some accounting rule said they couldn’t distribute it for free.
I guess they figured out a better way to do the accounting, since they never did that particular stunt again.
but the software has already been built so the budget was still found somehow. My gut feeling is that it's mostly useful for streamers, and some of them have big budgets so they went for a high price
The development was presumably funded off the back of expected revenue.
For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job - something connecting direct to a network outputting NDI, or something with SDI output.
> For your "streamer" stuff, I'd expect them to use something appropiate to the job
They mostly don't, though. The standard "high-end" streaming setup is whatever second-hand mirrorless camera has a clear HDMI output, and an HDMI capture card.
But it sounds like Canon actually invested extra development time to create crippled firmware that deviates from industry standards.
This is because this behavior is simply not illegal, and companies can get away with it.
The Louis Rossman video on this, which hasn't been made yet - is already playing in my head.
Now he already has 2 views on a video he didn't make yet.
This is quickly becoming he most popular video. I'm also viewing the follow up video in my head.
I have only watch the first 1/3 of it and sent it to three friends. It is that good.
here it is: https://youtu.be/xYLMZuKWLfE
This reminds me of Samsung and the SPO2 the oxygen sensor on the S8+ (I think) phone. All was well until one day an update disabled access to the sensor. Worse it was only for Canada where it was blocked. The access to the physical sensor on a phone I had owned for a few years, gone. Oh but you could buy their new watch that had an SPO2 sensor on it.
Disabling a physical component on a device a person owns and has owned for a while shouldn't be permitted.
Only disabling it in Canada sounds like a legal or licensing issue. Still Samsung’s fault for not working that out ahead of time, but probably not a cash grab.
I'm not sure since I don't have any Canon gear, but it's very likely that the app just uses the PTP protocol, which is an old but stil common standard. The main ioen source implementation is libgphoto2 and there's an OBS Studio plugin to use it as a camera source, after which you can use its built-in virtual webcam mode to use it as a webcam.
Canon G5 X mark 2 does not seem to be supported by gphoto:
Worth a try compiling a custom version after adding to https://github.com/knro/libgphoto2/blob/master/camlibs/canon... Hopefully it's as easy as that.
I'm able to pipe gphoto2 frames to a pipewire sink or v4l2 device and it works great for making my Canon EOS 250D into a webcam.
Newer Nikon and apparently also some Sony cameras simply support USB UVC ("the webcam protocol"), which makes this pure plug and play, but apparently Canon doesn't. For older cameras there's a Nikon webcam utility or something like that, which does exactly what you suggest: grab preview frames via PTP and stuff them into a video source. Or you get an HDMI/USB dongle for 10$.
Recent Canons support UVC as well (specifically the R1, R5 Mark II, R6 Mark II, R8, and R50).
> Software development isn’t free
Part of the burden of this is on us.
If a digital camera OS is a small embedded system running on a microcontroller it has a fixed cost, and lasts forever, just like the electrical components.
If it’s an instance of chromium running on Ubuntu server or Android, with hundreds of dependencies in your program alone than the cost to stop it from bricking is effectively infinite. (I’m even aware of medical surgery devices using Electron these days)
The Dragon spacecraft uses Electron as well.
I would not make that choice, but At least that has someone looking at it everyday. It’s not a device that gets left to do its job for 5 years.
Those early chromium devs had no idea the whole world would depend on them!
I have an EOS Kiss X4 (Rebel T2?) with Magic Lantern firmware. It uses the same software referenced in the article for MacOS and Windows. On Linux you can use v4l2loopback and gphoto2 but it requires loading an out of tree kernel module.
I have an old EOS 550D (I think it's called Rebel T2 in the US?) and I can use the webcam software for free. I downloaded a copy back in 2020 when Covid hit and Canon decided to release it. Maybe that would be the key to reverse engineer it and make it free for everybody?
Same model.
I've bought it in Japan so the model is labeled Kiss X4. Apparently they give it a different name for the product depending on the market: EOS 550D = Rebel T2i = EOS Kiss X4
Software works but you need to pay a recurring subscription (aargh I hate this model) to unlock features your hardware already supports.
Right there with the infamous $18 BMW heated seats subscription
The heated steering wheel software unlock on my X1 is a more reasonably priced £200.
As a Nikon guy, I'm using my Z50 as a webcam with little fuss. I've got a fake battery that plugs into AC power -- and my output is through HDMI to an Elgato Cam link 4k.
It doesn't overheat even after hours of use (unlike most full-frame sensors), and I've got it capturing in monochrome because I just really like B&W.
And because its face/eye detect autofocus is reasonably capable -- I can keep a wide aperture/shallow depth of field, which in turn, results in beautiful bokeh... So no Teams filters to blur my background -- I'm using optics instead.
That's nice but is it worth spending so much to get natural boketh in over team calls?
Not sure its teams but half the video calls I am in feature someone's ear or hair flickering in and out of the focus mask. For me that can be quite distracting.
One person I am in calls with regularly recently got a professional A/V setup for video calls and it is such a treat to get in a call with them.
So I think people would notice and appreciate a good setup?
I don't think too many people are buying a Nikon solely for this purpose, but rather they already have it and _also_ use it as a webcam. The main advantage there is - in my view anyway - that it allows you to control the field of view easily, compared to the built-in webcam. The far better image quality is just a bonus.
It's how I wanted to spend my money, and I'm happy with my decision.
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
That probably makes it pretty easy to reverse engineer their software to bypass the restrictions.
> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,
Canon is a company that is in the business of making profit (not just software or just hardware).
If they realize that they can charge you $1 for every time you chew gum while taking photos, and people will actually pay for that privilege $1-per-chewing-gum-session (disclaimer: chewing gum not provided) they would charge you!
Remember BMW and heating in the UK (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208)??
Getting paid $6k for a camera once is good. Getting paid another $50 a year for doing nothing is even better.
I assume the great brain who came with the idea is: "we got 10 million cameras out there, if 0.5% of those camera owners pay $50 pa, then that's 10m x 0.5% x $50 = $2.5m pa. If I could get a 100k bonus for bringing $2.5m gross to my company I would also suggest this idea.
Yunno, I wouldn't. Even for 100k on the table. I wouldn't suggest it. I have bills to pay, student loan debt, etc. but for one, I wouldn't want to suggest something that would have long term negative brand impact, and two, but more importantly, I wouldn't want to suggest developing something that if I were to use would piss me off. Make the world you want to see. Engineers share in the responsibility for things like this existing.
Sure, and that's why I don't think they'd invest heavily in anti-piracy measures. It requires a special skillset, your average developer isn't going to really know much about it. If I had to guess, there's a single "isProTier" function call that you just patch to return true. Maybe it's inlined and it's slightly more annoying. I doubt they did much more than that, but maybe I'm completely wrong.
CHDK back then had quiet a few people from Canon helping - as far as I remember the floor gossip.
There are things we could do with our time...
I suppose I'm glad some people find time to do this.
In case you are considering Nikon as an alternative, their Webcam Utility might be free, but it doesn't work on the latest version of macOS.
There are 3rd party utilities (paid), but I had trouble with autofocus when I tried them.
I wish camera manufacturers put half as much effort into usability as smartphone companies. Why does a camera need drivers to be recognized as a webcam at all? Why doesn't my 2000€ camera come with GPS and LTE built in? Why is the software still as crappy as in the 90ies?
> Why doesn't my 2000€ camera come with GPS and LTE built in?
2 seconds later on HN: why does my 2000€ camera spies on me? If you want a smartphone, use one, leave us be with our sane tools.
The problem is that right now, you need to install a Nikon Spyware app on your smartphone if you want geotagged photos.
If the camera had GPS built-in, you could have geo-tagged photos without needing spyware on your phone.
Geotagged photos are extremely useful, there's a reason why they sell GPS dongles for cameras. Cameras really should have that built-in (and I think the top-of-the-line models do)
Modern Sony cameras can be used as webcam without any software. Just plug in, select usb streaming, and done.
Sonys are some of the better cameras for software, but that's a low bar. I love my Nikons for picture taking though.
I'm running my full frame Nikon DSLR as a webcam using a $15 USB to HDMI dongle - works great.
Same, i also got a "remote clicker" cable, and have modified the button to always stay pressed, so it does not switch off after MAX_TIME (camera model D3300)
Wow, you made me go check and Nikon still hasn't fixed the software. Supported OS:
macOS Ventura version 13 macOS Monterey version 12 macOS Big Sur version 11
It does work there is just a bit more effort involved in setting it up
Nikon's HDMI output works just fine on MacOS.
Yes, but that requires extra hardware.
I wish Nikon would just include useful features like USB webcam mode out of the box.
Talking about solutions: Camlink. I use it with a very outdated camera for my online meetings. Works great and gave new life to a camera that I would throw away otherwise.
I wonder when we'll reach a tipping point for the subscription hell that the world is moving towards. On the other hand, with the amount of consolidation and difficulty competing (especially with Lina Khan out) I'm not sure if that will ever happen.
Im still waiting for mass-piracy where large parts of the population walk out on the subscription systems leaving the vendors to starve.
At some point I feel like it just has to collapse. The thing I don't really understand is subscriptions like the one in the article, how many of those types of subscriptions are effectively dead, in the sense that yes the customer keeps paying, but aren't actually using the "service" anymore.
The gym revenue model.
The indie / startup space has been so all in on subscription revenue that I guess it's not a huge surprise that the big companies eventually tried to get in on the act.
I tend to think of insufficient competition as a root cause.
And behind that at least in part is the tangle of bad laws, esp. in IP.
Canon truly is the HP of cameras.
Good thing there's Sony and Nikon.
The latest firmware update for the Sony A7S III has introduced unlockable licenses and a website where you can buy them. The first one (for DCI 4K) is free, but it looks like they'll be chraging for unlocking more "professional" firmware features in the future.
Yep. This is a sign that the meetings have already happened, and that the course has already been set. The idea was already sold, has picked some momentum, and possibly defines a few people's bonuses.
I'm not sure this is the case, but to play devils advocate - Sony themselves might have to license it from a third party
Hah I am aware. There's a lot of shit in Sony camp, but Canon is a whole other level.
Nikon seems to be the "good guy" these days.
This article essentially boils down to “Canon is a hardware company, they shouldn’t be allowed to charge for software.” I’m surprised this is news to you, but Canon can make money any way they want (within the bounds of local law). There is no law saying a company known for their hardware cannot decide to sell software.
If Canon started trying to sell cameras that literally only work with their software (not the case today) then maybe you’d have a semi-valid beef, although such a camera would also sell very poorly in the market given the many alternatives that exist, including Canon’s own previous lineup. Even then it wouldn’t be illegal, just harder to justify from a business perspective. Perhaps they could give away a DSLR for a yearly subscription and the math would pencil out for some people. That would be mildly interesting. Canon would have to do a lot of work to close such a product, though, as all of their existing hardware is extremely open.
I purchased a Canon M50 to use as a webcam during covid. I spend a lot of time doing remote training and quality video is paramount to me. At that time, the Canon webcam software worked fine on my Windows machine.
I later moved back to a Mac as my daily driver and the Canon software was never reliable on m1 chips. The camera didn't have clean HDMI out. I was pretty frustrated because my fancy webcam no longer worked. Canon showed little desire to support Macs.
I purchased a used Sony that had clean HDMI and it worked great with a cheap HDMI capture device.
I now use an Insta360 webcam with a large sensor. Image quality and focus speed are great. It has slightly less bokeh effect than the Canon and Sony, but folks always comment about how good my video looks.
They are also quite a bit cheaper than going the DSLR route for webcam.
> Canon is a hardware company, not a software company
The problem is we commercially enable hardware companies to be shitty software companies by buying hardware that lacks basic open protocols. We accept single platform lenses that could work in any similar mount. Photographers invite this mistreatment.
It would be trivial for Canon to stream the live view out as UVC over USB and it would have Just Worked™ as a webcam on every platform.
This isn't just a Canon problem. It took Nikon several generations of dSLR to add standard USB ports. This could be Japanese hubris or a lack of competition or a lack of engineers actually talking to their customers.
The whole real-camera-as-webcam field seems like a complete disaster. The few models that do work well in this scenario (clean HDMI output, no auto-shutoff, etc) became very expensive during the early pandemic days.
I have cannon r5 and previously had sony cameras. I'm bamboozeled how in this day and age software connecting cameras with PCs is so bad, not to mention tethered shooting. And the fact that 5+k camera have slow wifi chips for no reason so you cant tether via wifi just angers me.
Software on the actual camera is yet another question for me, why don't we have cameras with full fledged modern OS-es running custom androids for example with installable apps so you can finish a lot of stuff on the camera itself or make sharing to wherever a breeze.
No professional wants to deal with wifi, maybe ethernet.
So it's at most a prosumer feature for which the wifi they have is fine.
For professional use we want SDI which can transmit uncompressed video at whatever frame rate the camera supports, and we pay for that... Maybe HDMI but that has it's own headaches...
And the moment you want Android with apps on it you run into all the problems that comes with Android with apps on it...
You are then also responsible for keeping said app up to date. If you think android solves that problem you purely need to look at the custom modding community for how annoying firmware support is, and these cameras won't have generic phone camera chips, they have custom processors which would then require custom firmware.
But my usual argument, if it's so easy go and do it. Many successful projects/companies has started exactly like that, why don't we have X? Go build it.
Realistically, a better wifi chip would add almost nothing to production cost, but there are a lot of professionals doing product photography that would like fast wifi tethering.
Well, that would prevent them from selling overpriced grips with integrated better wifis which is 999 usd from Cannon...
> Software on the actual camera is yet another question for me, why don't we have cameras with full fledged modern OS-es running custom androids for example with installable apps so you can finish a lot of stuff on the camera itself or make sharing to wherever a breeze.
A little more than 10 years ago Samsung tried that with their Galaxy NX (a bona fide DSLR running Android). It flopped and most reviewer noted that it a generally sluggish camera; a deal breaker when one of the design constraint of all their other competitor is to be reactive.
We mustn't forget that the main purpose of a camera is to take pictures, not to connect to a network.
I agree on what the main purpose is and that must be executed well, but it is 2025 and for a 5 000 usd camera we should be able to get both, great working camera with amazing and fast software.
> why don't we have cameras with full fledged modern OS-es running custom androids for example with installable apps…
because then you end up something that is mediocre at a bunch of random stuff rather than great at something specific.
a multitool is rarely as good at hammering as an actual hammer. a multitool is almost never as good at screwing as an actual screwdriver.
> I have cannon r5
what caliber?
This article is missing some very critical details.
Do you have to use the software from Cannon? What about any other webcam software that runs on Mac?
Does Cannon's software support non-Cannon webcams? IE, is it standalone software that the author prefers to use over other webcam software?
Is this a case where most customers will never use the webcam software, thus Cannon is "passing the savings on to them" by charging separately for the software?
Canon, and yes you do, the camera is not recognized without the drivers installed. Actually, it barely works even with the drivers installed. There is a free version that I have had working in the past, to glorious success, with the Canon 1DX, but the current 5Div does nothing, and I don't want to pay to find out that it still doesn't work.
There's half a camera's worth of features in these things that people won't use, but they still pay for them.
I use a Canon EOS 90D via hdmi & streamlink, so yes there are alternatives.
Doesn't help the op, but I use my Nikon Z6 II as a webcam under Fedora and have been doing this for a few months now, mostly without any problems.
Here's a guide for those interested (not by me): https://www.crackedthecode.co/how-to-use-your-dslr-as-a-webc...
Don't buy Canon. They've also been very shitty about third party lenses
> Companies squeezing every last penny out out their customers is no news. And Canon is no stranger.
In relation to the rent-seeking behavior of Canon they allegedly nudged a certain open-source camera firmware project not to support some of their most high-end cameras. But with Canon losing interest in DSLRs I hope the situation changes.
> Software development isn’t free
Given how long digital cameras have been around (more because that says it can be done with a codebase that fits in context rather than anything about memorisation), I wonder how good LLMs are at coding this specific thing.
(I don't have a camera to try it with, or I'd give it a go myself).
Can't you still use the European site to download the EOS Webcam Utility for free? https://www.canon-europe.com/cameras/eos-webcam-utility/
It's just a business model like segmentation IMHO. BMWs or Tesla's having the hardware but require a payment for enabling it or CPU manufacturers disabling certain features to sell them at a lower price. IIRC the idea is that to let people pay what they can so you can have larger profits when allowing lower price points. In this case it appears to directly charge for a service(a software that needs to be created and maintained) that you may choose not to have.
I don't have problem with these practices at all as long as they don't try to prevent it you from running your hardware through alternative means. If the camera police isn't trying to get you for writing your own software to avoid paying Canon 5$ a month, its all good.
With CPU manufacturers it at least makes sense for them to have a market for partially faulty chips. That's not what's going on here.
They don't just sell the defective one for cheap though, they have all kinds of tricks and the ratios fit the market.
What setup would people recommend? I've tried using an old android phone as a webcam on macOS but it kept flaking out and needing to be reset.
What webcams, if any, have higher quality optics?
Do other SLRs do the same thing as Canon and charge a subscription?
Some thoughts based on my anecdotal experience — but it depends on the price you are willing to pay.
You can get quite good webcams for $100–300 (from Insta360, Obsbot, Logitech maybe …) which work out of the box with USB-C and have mostly okayish software that supports changing things like brightness, white balance, etc. These however still have small sensors and cannot achieve a good shallow depth-of-field (bokeh). Running them at higher sensitivity (ISO), e.g. in darker environments, inevitably causes noise. But if you just want to participate in meetings, it does not matter. I had a Logitech StreamCam and upgraded to an Insta360 Link 2C, which is definitely much better but still not on-par with a proper camera. You should at least get a good keylight or ring light.
The next step up would be mirrorless cameras with built-in or interchangeable lenses made for vlogging, which also can be used like a webcam. They have much bigger sensors and better image quality at a pricing point of $400-1000, e.g. Sony ZV-E10 II, Fuji X-M5, Canon EOS M50 Mark II, … most of them claim webcam support with the provided software. Fuji's software is bad though, so I wouldn't recommend it on a Mac. I can't talk about the other ones. The benefit is that they also have a flip screen that you can use for better framing. They all support webcam modes.
If you have a camera that has an HDMI output and that outputs a clean HDMI signal (without any overlays), you can also buy an HDMI USB capture device and feed that into OBS, which allows you to set up a virtual webcam. There are cheap no-name USB capture cards that produce mediocre images, and more top-of-the line ones like the Elgato Cam Link. This should be the most device-independent variant where you're also not dependent on any vendor's proprietary software.
Thank you for a comprehensive answer, I appreciate the time you put into it.
This is another case in point that people should research the software capabilities of the devices they purchase.
Typically, that can be reduced to one simple question: Can it run custom firmware or custom operating system?
If it cannot, you have to make do with whatever restrictions the manufacturer has imposed in their software. Be it a subscription for webcam mode. Or even completely disabling your device if they so decide.
If it can run custom firmware or operating system, there is a fair chance that the community creates software for this device that is actually good. One that allows you to do what you want with it.
Well, is there any camera that allow you do just that?
I am not sure. I am unfamiliar with the consumer camera segment.
I have heard about some "firmware enhancements" like Magic Lantern or CHDK for Canon which, if I understand correctly, are some kind of extensions that could be loaded by the camera's main firmware on startup and then provide additional functionality.
It is not a custom firmware. But it offers similar functionality.
> Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6300 from the article's title, much closer to $900
I am confused, I assume the 900 dollars is the cost of his camera but where did the 6300 figure come from?
MSRP for the EOS R1, the flagship camera - but apropos of anything, that's not a camera ANYONE would use for a webcam (its focus area is event/sports, and high shooting rates. For anyone else, generally, the R5II is effectively the high end.
Don’t most of these cameras have an hdmi output? During the pandemic, I assisted a local church with streaming after their plea for help reached me. We initially used a fairly cheap video camera’s hdmi output with a cheap HDMI to USB dongle to get a feed to OBS. It worked extremely well, although it was later replaced with a professional camera that had actuators to allow it to be moved via a remote during their services.
Some foresaw this and add an OSD showing time/battery/etc to the HDMI output so you can’t get a clean feed.
Is there no option for turning that off?
HDMI output to 8 Euro USB-Grabber is the solution. However this is a case of: Why the fuck did they not just make it a class compliant webcam to begin with.
Why $6,2999 when the article says he payed around $900?
> Why $6,2999 when the article says he payed around $900?
In the fifth paragraph:
“Admittedly, it did not cost me the $6300 from the article's title, much closer to $900. Nonetheless, everything I'm describing translates to every other Canon camera model!”
He discovered this information about his $900 camera but has found that it also applies to other models, likely the Canon EOS-1D X Mark III.
Because it gets more clicks.
He likely bought an old model second-hand :)
Edit: The camera he uses is a 2019 pocket camera. The 6299 must be another model that has the same restrictions.
[flagged]
What tha hell
Out of nowhere comment, but I somehow stumbled upon this thread which seems to point to OBS for making it work. FWIW. <https://www.reddit.com/r/canon/comments/skdz89/experience_so...>
This doesn't fix the problems listed in the article, you'd still only get a 720p 30 fps feed out of a camera that shoots 4K at 60 fps. That thread helps with Zoom not finding the low quality feed to begin with.
Sony's "webcam" app that does the same purpose is free but buggy as fuck and not available on Apple M CPUs (at least not the one for the A7S2).
I don't understand why this is necessary in the first place anyway. These cameras all have USB interfaces to expose the card content or even remote control, it wouldn't have cost them much engineering effort to add an UVC descriptor...
Not all companies. The DJI Action camera has a built-in webcam mode that you can select whenever you plug it in via USB, and it just works.
Reasons like this is why the Japanese companies are eating sh*t and are VERY interested in pushing for a US-China war just like the western companies.
Everything coming out of China is way more customer friendly, usually way cheaper and getting better and better to a point that they are surpassing everything else that exists. If DJI releases a full-frame mirrorless camera with L-mount (which they are going to), Canon, Nikon, Fuji and all these companies with firmware from the 90s will die and I am not going to miss them.
They have made absolutely no effort to provide any value and a whole lot of tacit collusion is going on. They still sell you SD cards instead of including an SSD which would be MUCH cheaper and faster. Same with battery technology. Compatibility, apps, software... everything.
Regarding products from China being cheaper: remember that Japanese, Korean, and Western companies are the ones mostly innovating and absorbing the R&D costs. Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung? Having stolen that IP[0][1][2], without any R&D costs but with dirt cheap manufacturing due to direct and indirect subsidies like relatively almost nonexistent labour protection laws, PRC companies could of course immediately flood the market with cheaper alternatives.
You can choose your suppliers by other measures than merely price. Arguably, you should if the market you are particupating in is not free and fair in this way.
Personally, as a happy owner of a Japanese-made under-$2k camera that works perfectly well for all purposes and even has official CAD files published for accessory 3D printing enthusiasts, I see no reason to switch to a Chinese brand (well, also there is no product that beats it on both specs and price, but even if there was I would think twice). People tend to over-generalize, but reality is not as simple as “all manufacturers from %country1% are better because X and all manufacturers from %country2% suffer from issue Y”.
[0] https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=113...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/south-korea-indic...
[2] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-07-19/busines...
> They still sell you SD cards instead of including an SSD which would be MUCH cheaper and faster.
I don't think the power draw of an SSD plays well with the current battery tech.
Plus most user value the fact that you can rapidly swap those thing. The last thing you want to do during a wedding is having to wait for the data to transfer and/or the battery to recharge.
DJI is a potential backdoor.
other cameras aren't?
I use my Sony a7iv as a webcam. Plug the USB C in and it is recognized as a webcam. I got asked a lot im teams calls what webcam I use
Today I had trouble using OBS Software with my suite of old MacBooks, IPhones and iPads… I thought keeping them would be useful
Eugh.
Meanwhile, the 30 bucks camera I bought works out of the box. I didn't even need to install any software. Decent quality, no frills.
It's actually worse than the title suggests. It's $5 per month! I wonder what justifies this recurring cost.
Yes, I'm so completely fed up with recurring subscriptions for things with negligible or no recurring costs for the seller. This one is of course particularly obnoxious given the hardware itself is expensive and the recurring cost is 0. But for example I would've gotten an Oura ring by now if they would just charge twice the price for the ring itself and not require a subscription, even though the subscription fees over the lifetime of the hardware would probably add up to a significantly smaller amount. To me it's just incredibly off-putting -- it reeks of greed and feels like a blatant attempt to fool customers by obscuring the actual cost. I guess it must be working for them, but for me, the cost of anything with a recurring fee gets mentally rounded up to "approximately $infinity".
I had an oherwise perfectly fine Canon camera which I spent hours trying to make work as a webcam by downloading this and that and configuring this and that and in the end discovered it was not possible for some reason and got rid of the camera.
If I buy a camera again (probably won't), #1 selection criteria will be connectivity.
I firmly believe this is the branch digital cameras are dying on, and at this point, probably must die on.
If these opened up, at least to the level iPhone did in 2007, they'd have an ecosystem as people still used them. As-is, for most purposes, my Android phone is a better camera than my full frame interchangeable lens camera.
I think I disagree on every point you've raised here.
First, my sony camera (and all sony cameras released in the last ~3+ years) support USB video streaming out of the box, with no drivers. I suspect other brands are the same. It looks like canon is just stuck in the dark ages on this one. They also support remote camera control over USB, and all sorts of other things. Mostly - but not entirely - in an open ecosystem. I have several devices which can control the camera over the USB connection - so it can't be that hard.
Second, are you sure your android phone takes better photos? What camera & lens do you have on your digital camera? Have you upgraded from the kit lens it came with?
I got a sony a7iv last year. If I take the same photo with my a7 and my iphone, the photos are wildly different. The iphone's photos are lovely, but they have this very slightly AI generated gloss about them. Everything is slightly too clean somehow. Its like I'm looking at reality plus. In comparison, The photos from my sony camera feel like real photos. Dark things are dark. Light things are light. If I crank the ISO at night, the photos are noisy. If I blow out the aperature, the depth of field hits you like a truck made of clouds. The photos look like what I pointed my camera at.
In short, I massively prefer the photos I get from my dedicated camera. I suspect if I showed you, you'd prefer them too.
> I suspect other brands are the same.
My research shows Sony is the outlier here. Fuji, Canon, Nikon and Panasonic all require software or drivers to be used as a USB camera (or at least did as of a year ago or so).
Also, the camera control software these companies put out, for a computer or a phone, is almost always awful.
Buggy, slow, unreliable.. It's a real problem.
> Second, are you sure your android phone takes better photos? What camera & lens do you have on your digital camera? Have you upgraded from the kit lens it came with?
That wasn't actually my statement. My statement was that it's a better camera.
My Android will actually take dramatically better photos than a u43 camera with kit lens, especially in low-light. It's not even in the same ballpark. My full frame with a Zeiss f/1.4 lens will take better photos than my cell phone. My cell phone also won't reasonably zoom (although it does have a telephoto of sorts and a wide angle, it can't compete with a 200mm let alone a 500mm on my full frame).
However, holistically, it's a better camera. If I take a photo with my cell phone, I can be editing it on my computer in a few minutes. If I'd like a different display -- for example for framing -- I switch apps. That's not to mention panoramas, photospheres, and other computational photography features. Computational stacking for low light can give pretty impressive results too. The list goes on and on. This paragraph could be an essay.
With the exception of sensor size, zoom, and clicky buttons, my cell phone does so much more. Those are important, mind you, but something like a 50 MP, f/1.7, 1/1.31" sensor on a Pixel 9 Pro is about equivalent to an APS camera with a kit lens for equivalent aperture. Under most conditions, the photo quality from a good cell phone is indistinguishable from a big camera. So all the other stuff does become more important.
I did pick a cell phone for its photography features. It's not a random Android phone.
> my Android phone is a better camera than my full frame
I'm probably a terrible photographer and I shoot with a "budget" kit (Canon R10, RF 100-400mm F5.6-8 IS USM, RF 35mm F1.8 IS STM), but looking at the 10 last photos I've taken and liked (so going back a year basically), I don't think I'd be able to retake a single one of them on my iPhone and get something comparable.
> As-is, for most purposes, my Android phone is a better camera than my full frame interchangeable lens camera.
The smartphone ate the market segment that was previously occupied by point and shoot cameras, not pro / enthusiast camera. I don't think dedicated / non-smart cameras as we have today will die. You will still need dedicated camera for wedding, sports, wildlife, etc. For these you don't need a software ecosystem, you need a robust hardware.
I agree that for sharing to my family a photo of my dog looking cute my phone is a better camera. However for the use case I mentioned, I don't see how I can decently edit a 50 Mpx image on a screen that's not even a quarter of the size of my laptop.
Not to say that better software/feature is not needed though; I would love to be able to do an efficient initial culling/sorting of a given shoot in-camera.
I agree with your comment.
But as phone cameras are reaching limits due to the physical amount of light that they can capture, “computational photography” ML models are essentially making up details that aren’t there.
So your Android photos may have the look you want, but be worse for many purposes.
> As-is, for most purposes, my Android phone is a better camera than my full frame interchangeable lens camera.
Any Android/iOS flagship phone right now is MILES behind current full-frame mirrorless technology, and I doubt they will ever be truly comparable. There are too many technical limitations.
I am pretty sure we will eventually have consumer cameras with an Android-like OS and the equivalent of today's full-frame sensors, delivering awesome footage, but mobile devices will never come close to a (semi-)professional camera.
5$ to unblock such a feature is already infuriating. But when you read the article, it explains it’s 5$ PER MONTH.
In fact, the problem is that you have to buy a subscription, with all the implications in terms of loss of control, privacy, security, etc...
$5 on a $6299 camera is nothing, just pay for it, petty but not really infuriating. Even at $500 I would simply pay should I need it. If I had reasons to buy a $6299 camera, it probably means a budget in the tens of thousands, for lenses, lighting, accessories, etc... $500 is peanuts by comparison.
But I certainly wouldn't want my very expensive setup to fail just because some server is down.
I've been eyeing the R6 mark ii, which is u understand correctly will connect to a computer and present itself as a video device so you don't need any additional software. I only run Linux, so that sounds great!
I haven't pulled the trigger on it, can anyone who owns it confirm or deny this?
I saw people using Sony cameras as webcams, probably because of the easy plug and play setup.
My Canon EOS R8 can be configured to connect via USB-C as a webcam and works perfectly.
The EOS R8 was released less than a year ago and that output is still capped at 2K and 30 fps. Meanwhile the camera itself shoots 4K at 60 fps (if you go Full HD, you can even shoot 180 fps). So saying it works perfectly is not quite accurate, you still need either extra hardware or extra software if you want to actually use it to the full capacity.
I'm sure Canon would like me to also pay every cent I have for every sip of water I take, and the ones I do not.
Companies that focus on what they want, rather than what the customer wants, will cease to exist (or change hands).
This model is not listed as supported, but generally gphoto2 can do the webcam thing for DSLRs.
Not to be off topic but Apple needs to build a fully featured full frame digital camera with an iPhone slot. That would be game over for so many users.
What do you mean by "an iPhone slot"?
As in, so you can plug the camera into an iPhone and transfer photos from camera to phone?
I know this isn't the point but investing in a usb capture card will permanently solve this issue for all future cameras.
> $5/mo, $50/yr
A one time payment would have been inconvenient, I assumed that based on the title; but that’s even worse.
Yikes. Searching around a bit, it seems people frequently use an Elgato capture card or similar to interface with OBS
I guess someone higher up said “well, someone who has forked out over $6k won’t even blink for an additional $5”
I wonder if you could just do it with the canon api?
They have CCAPI which is the camera control api, I believe it is rest based.
Yeah, that's pretty bad business practice.
I have a few fuji cameras, and sadly their webcam software doesn't work for me, but for a cheap fix I bought a low-cost (~$10) HDMI USB capture card on AliExpress, and it works wonders.
"Yeah, we equipped your car with heated seats prior to transferring its ownership to you, but heating your seat is a license-protected comfort which requires a subscription"
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated...
Many of those "features" were walked back on backlash, just to then be bundled "free" for the initial buyer only...
> Many of those "features" were walked back on backlash, just to then be bundled "free" for the initial buyer only...
Like Tesla... buy FSD? It doesn't transfer with you OR the vehicle, just ... vanishes.
but you are using their software and they can choose how to sell that to you however the want. You're options is to vent and not buy another Canon. This subscription-based purchase is not new and will only get worst. Opensource FTW
Is this like how I have to pay my mobile carrier to use my own phone as a wifi hotspot?
The software in the article looks like a fun little oldschool cracking/RE project.
We seem to be passing the point where we discover new things that software can do and entering a phase where development is primarily going to be about gatekeeping, paywalling and eliminating capabilities. After all, why would you sell something when you can sell a subscription to that something and get paid every month? Even better, why not sell the thing and then rent the ability to use the thing?
Amazing the market share Canon has considering how bad they are at software.
What sort of society are we careening toward? More power to the hackers!
It absolutely fascinates me that GoPro didn't dominate this space
This reminds me of HP turning printing into a monthly subscription [1], BMW experimenting with heated seat subscriptions [2], and countless other manufacturers trying to rent us physical features or products we’ve already paid for. It’s as if owning something outright is becoming a relic of the past. Honestly, this trend is getting out of hand.
Imagine if we live to the day where fresh air becomes a monthly subscription—with tiered plans, of course! Basic air might be free but stale, while premium plans offer "mountain-fresh" or "ocean-breeze" options. And heaven forbid you forget to renew your subscription or your credit card expires—suddenly, breathing might not be in your favor!
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1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2251993/the-nightmare-is-rea...
2. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
Is chdk still a thing?
Great article, yeah it is quite sad with these things. Louis Rossman talked extensively on these issues.
By the way, your images go to a weird url for me, maybe it is because it is Brave browser.
For example
https://romanzipp.com/blog/[%7B%22id%22:%22assets::blog//no-...
Yep, I'm on it. Thanks!!
>> Software development isn’t free, and I’m happy to pay for software I use regularly. However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company, and they should—due to the lack of standards—provide software that allows you to use their cameras as intended.
Software development isn't free, but everyone needs to hammer the message home to everyone they know that the marginal cost of software is ZERO. Any company continuing to charge for software is probably rolling that money back into enshittification which nobody wants anyway.
This Canon software would actually make their product more valuable like the software inside the camera that they don't charge subscription for. Perhaps a one time price for an app, but this whole subscription and advertising trend is one I have not and will not join.
v4l2-ctl on linux allows me to change such settings on a global level, maybe that might work if a version can be found on his OS.
What did you expect from proprietary software?
Proprietary software is just one part of this issue. There seems to be a growing trend in attempting to entrap a servile subscriber base within your own walled enclosure.
To be successful you need to keep your buyer unaware of the trap until they have too much invested within your walls to cut their losses emotionally. Here the poster has bought a high cost camera (even at a discount) without realising there would be an on-going recurring cost.
Expensive propriety hardware, tied to propriety software, tied to an online account with telemetry, where nothing works without all the other bits is a wonderful trap. It works great for John Deer and I guess will soon be coming with your next vehicle.
Personally, someone bought me a Fitbit Sense 2 watch for Christmas. It can't even be used as a watch until you have signed in with a Google account and "consent to Google using my health and wellness data". Of course you don't get to see this before you break the seal on the box. And although the watch gathers lots of your data, you can't see it until after it has been upload to Google, and some of it is only available once you have signed up for Fitbit Premium.
But wait, it gets better. The time on the default watch face is tiny (for an old fart like me). I could download a larger one, if I signed up for Fitbit Premium. I could sign up to download the developer kit and write my own for free (a new watch face is a simple example). However, if I go too far and accidentally break the data collection, they reserve the right to suspend my accounts and turn my £200 "watch" into a brick.
I am still deciding if I can return my sanity using a hammer.
Proprietary software is absolutely the issue. Once you open that door you are just waiting for the long list of abuses to run down on you over time. Proprietary software puts the power on the publisher's part and therefore you are completely at their mercy.
> It can't even be used as a watch until you have signed in with a Google account and "consent to Google using my health and wellness data". Of course you don't get to see this before you break the seal on the box.
Fitbit is not supported but for many smart watches you can use gadgetbridge to avoid sending your data anywhere
During COVID, I was able to set up my 5DS (a ~10yo model now) as a webcam for free. Did they stop supporting the software they released to do that or just paywalled it?
I know, some things you don't know beforehand, but by buying this you endorse this greed. You make it perpetuate. Don't
Ugh - the continual "enshitification" of products and offerings. (Betchya 5-6 years ago this would have worked without issue)
Am sick of basic features being pay-walled, or subscription-only - or abandoned/bricked when the company decides to "end-of-life" them after a couple years.
While it ain't pretty - or small - at least it doesn't require a subscription... "CinePi"... (https://github.com/schoolpost/CinePI)
Software development isn't free, but someone buying a camera shouldn't _need_ to pay the manufacturer to ship them custom software for scenarios such as this. The manufacturer should include documentation so that anyone owning the camera can write software to integrate with it.
TBH, this is true of pretty much any form of consumer hardware. But this isn't a technical problem, it's a social one. So we can't solve it with tech; we need legislation around this kind of BS.
The question I have is why not make interoperability mandatory so both Apple and Canon have to make products that work with eachother instead of weird useless arbitrary rules?
It's like people love the horrible experience lol rather trauma than education type shit Leibniz was so beyond wrong about this smh
This one behavior was the reason I bought a Sony instead of a canon, and will never buy a Canon. I’m just too old to fuck around with this type of bullshit anymore.
I’m willing to offer so much loyalty to companies who aren’t in the business of fucking over their customers.
Fuck Canon, fuck shady ass business practices.
Canon can GTFO, this nonsense profiteering should be illegal, and probably will be eventually. It's hostile to customers and will be received poorly.
Easy solution, don't use macOS.
It's the same experience on Windows, but you do you random internet rant guy.
I meant use a real OS like Linux.
Canon makes lots of software, so a little disingenuous to say that they are a hardware company that doesn’t get to charge for their software.
So, uh, has anybody noticed that the headline is false?
You can use your Canon camera as a webcam without having to pay for it. It even says so in the last image in the article! You plug it in via USB and you get a webcam. It's just that you can't use any feature other than reading the video feed. But you can get other software for that.
I guess "You can't use Canon's webcam software to adjust your video feed, or remote control the camera, or get 60fps video; that will be $5/month" would make a less catchy headline.
This is misleading. You don't get a proper video feed, you get 720p at 30 fps out of a camera that shoots 4K at 60 fps. On top of that, no white balance, no color correction, no etc. My laptop's built in webcam does better than that.
You're arguing past me. What I'm saying is that without paying, the Canon is a webcam: it's a camera that plugs in and gives your computer a video input. It may not be the best possible webcam that it can be, for sure. And paying a subscription for the extra capabilities does suck! But nonetheless, the central point of the headline - "you cannot use it as a webcam" is false.
People need to start referring to those products with the "Enshittified" suffix.
That's the Canon G5 X II Enshittified.
Wait until you hear about Canon printers.
I gave up on mine. It's more than obvious to me that it doesn't care if there's ink in the cartridge after some time and just starts malfunctioning.
Enshitification, incarnate.
I know this isn't the point, but here's my nixos script for using a canon DSLR as a webcam
https://codeberg.org/traverseda/nixos-config/src/commit/ee3f...
To get this out of nixos you need to create 4 files
dslrWebcamConfContent goes into your modprobe config
dslrUdevRule goes into your udev rules
dslrWebcamScript goes somewhere, probably /opt
dslrWebcamService is a systemd service.
Upvoted for hacking on hacker news
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I use my global shutter Sony A9 III as a webcam as well and it's amazing, but Sony has it's own WTF moment. It has a feature of showing custom grid line / frames in the camera screen (like for passport photo) and it costs $149 [1] :-)
Quote from [1]: "At $149, this may be the most cost-effective camera accessory ever."
All other features (including selection of on which eye - left or right - AI human tracking autofocus should focus on) are free :)
I can't believe the license is permanent! Sony is leaving so much on the table. I'd introduce a gridline-lite for 2 gridlines and then a middle tier for 3 gridlines and a box.
Another option would be to use blockchain and wifi so that customers (affiliates) could earn extra cash on vacation by pairing their camera with other tourists that see the feature and like it.
That same blockchain technology could also enable off network usage based billing of say 25 cents each time a picture is taken. Pixel noise water mark cryptographic hashes to track compliance, of course.
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> I've tried this at first in 2024 with macOS 14, which did not work.
Why not blame Apple for not providing drivers? It is pretty normal in Linux to check hardware compatibility. You mainly buy hardware with good software support.
Apple does not support this camera, so do not buy it!
The lad is using an Apple computer which is a closed walled garden architecture designed specifically for whales. I'm sorry, but this is an invitation to be fleeced. A loud cry to everyone around to put their hands into your purse and grab some money.
Now you understand why people fight for open source software and use Linux. Join us or keep dealing with the walled garden scams.
