It’s not even a $5 one-off fee, it’s a $5/month subscription!
You start to feel badly for legacy tech manufacturers like Canon.
Then they do things like this, and suddenly I am happy to see them die.
You can’t treat your customers with contempt and not expect them to return the sentiment.
I have such fond memories of shooting on my old Canon DSLR.
It’s been 20 years since I bought my last DSLR (life, you know?) and I recently started thinking that maybe I should buy another before they close out the DSLR product line.A huge disappointment to see this enshitification.
There’s a reason mirrorless is here to stay, the autofocus is basically cheat mode compared to a DSLR. I do miss some aspects of the optical viewfinder though.
Yeah, I know. And I know there’s way more market demand for mirrorless, as well as simpler mechanicals, so they have less failure points, but do I ever love the sound and that subtle feeling of a mirror slapping up and the shutter flicking out of place.
The feedback that offers when you capture a photo feels like you’re doing something ‘real’ when you take a photo. Everyone knows that you captured that moment. Those photons are yours forever, trapped in your little art-making box.It’s kind of romantic, in a way. I feel like modern tech is great, but tends to be inscrutable.
Absolutely, while being able to silently capture a 30FPS burst is kinda magic, it just feels wrong. I still shoot with mechanical shutter (at least second curtain), basically for the feels (and the extra bit depth).
Is mechanical shutter necessary for max bit depth on your camera? It isn’t on mine (Sony), but bit depth reduces to 12 bit if you max out the framerate. You might still be able to get full 14 bit RAWs if you drop the framerate.
I believe so, ao I only use it when I need to be silent like a ceremony or on set.
I have a fair collection of Canon glass, a few of which are L series.
I haven’t taken them out of the closet in a damn long time.
Oof. That hurts to hear.
Canon camera sales are actually going up.
Well this policy seems like a good way for them to nip that in the bud. Customer contempt is toxic to brand loyalty.
I’d be surprised if most people knew or cared, sadly.
Especially if most big companies are moving in that direction, people get used to the suck and think of it as our new normal.
I found a way to use my old Nikon as a webcam using an HDMI capture card. Hooked it up to the camera’s mini HDMI port and wham! had a working webcam!
But after thirty minutes, it would always switch off the live view, so i was left with a camera feed of the menus. Turns out this is an import restriction so it can be imported as a “still camera” and not a “movie camera” for significantly less taxes.
Enter some wonderful soul who found a way to hack the firmware to allow live view to stay on continuously, so now it works great as a webcam!
I have a D3000.
Literally the last DSLR to be made without a live view … if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have any.
The limit is only true if you’re also recording to internal memory. My understanding is that it’s a European Union issue that we all have to suffer for.
That understanding is untrue, it was actually an internationally agreed upon tariff by the WTO. It has since been repealed though, so cameras built after 2019, or ones that have had a firmware update since then, no longer have the limit.
I’m going off my experience running an 18 hour livestream over HDMI with my 2015 Nikon dslr.
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I hope you’ve paid the difference in taxes for a video camera.
Why? A material change was made to the item after the point of import. This would be like taxing a timber importer as though they were importing furniture.
ffs people, they weren’t serious, they were pointing out how stupid the tax was.
Why? The thing is a webcam now.
wooosh
Double woooosh
ah, i’ve been suckered, bamboozled, and some might even say hornswoggled!
Lmao these fuckin people can’t take a joke.
Made me laugh.
I hope you’ve paid the difference in taxes for a comedian.
Until consumers learn to reject proprietary software this will be the case
Remember that GNU was founded after RMS had to deal with proprietary software on peripherals
Was it more than a printer (that’s what I read about)?
Man a one time fee, like fine I’d suck it up I guess but a subscription? Just why
Salesforce, that’s why. It started with them and now it’s the first thing regarded MBAs from Ivy league “top” universities consulting on behalf of McKinsey, PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte recommend to any Ctype position as soon as they are onboarded. If there was a virus that deleted consulting and marketing firms from the face of the earth, I’m positive we could end war and world hunger in a decade.
Your disposable income, such as it is, belongs to them. That’s why.
Draining working class with bug bites. Every sub is another swarm of insects in need of blood. You’re not supposed to notice.
Middlemen upon middlemen inserting themselves into society, inventing solutions for problems that don’t exist. Extracting fees and service charges on more and more transactions and basic functions.
Geez, during the pandemic Sony released its functionaltiy for free! It was really nice.
I missed that one, thanks for the link 🙂
I used that to turn an HX into a church service streaming cam. The zoom and quality were fantastic! It was far better than that knock off webcam they had before. Literally saved thousands of dollars thanks to Sony releasing that software!
This reminds me of when I tried to buy an insta360 camera, only to learn after the fact that it requires an app to function. And that the app isn’t even compatible with all phones and tablets.
Maybe it’s buried on the store page somewhere that installing the app is a requirement, but I was pretty annoyed to learn that I had just bought a plastic brick unless I also wanted to upgrade my phone.
Oh wow…wtf. I was about to buy it, thanks. Is there an alternative?
I don’t know, I kind of gave up trying to buy one after the first one didn’t work out. Mapillary recommends the GoPro Max (this was why I was interested), but I couldn’t tell you if it needs an app to work.
Same with DJI pocket cameras - you need to use their app and allow it to connect to the internet as part of the out of the box “setup” process.
Sony gave us that webcam feature for free. Please don’t get any bright ideas, Sony.
Ah… Proprietary hardware and software. Ugh.
Shareholders will surely love it when we treat high end professionals like shit
Is there an open source solution? I actually stopped using my Canon camera as a webcam because the software was so shitty, now they want me to pay to use it 🤣 All they’ve done is stopped me from ever buying another Canon camera again.
You can do this on Linux using gphoto2, ffmpeg, and v4l2loopback. You probably won’t get full resolution but the quality will still be good enough for video conferencing. See here for a guide.
Cheers! Thank you
The problem is that Canon locks the higher resolution capabilities behind a paywall, and this particular solution is also low resolution. So it’s not really a bypass for this, at least not in the current state.
Good point! For my use case (on a different brand, Sony) I’m fine with the lowered resolution since I just use it for video conferencing, in which case the raw resolution is limited anyway. But for users who need higher resolution, using an HDMI capture card might be better for a one time fee rather than a subscription.
Panasonic provides the software for free for their cameras. Still only 720p but at least you’re not paying for it.
Wasn’t the first ever webcam just a regular camera that took shots of the office coffee pot? I’m pretty sure it was a bespoke script
I also remember the dude who made a homebrew app for his DS to control his Canon DSLR for long exposure shots because the alternative was to drag a fat laptop around or buy a $300 Canon PDA.
regular camera that took shots of the office coffee pot?
well it predated ‘digital’ cameras, was around when film was still big - 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
128x128px greyscale feed was achieved with a video camera connected to an Acorn Archimedes quipped with a video capture card.
Analogue camcorder with video out then.
$30 billion company want**'**s
twitch
Also, they should be clear that it’s $5 per month
There are so many apps that will let you use your SLR or phone as a webcam. I’ve played around with a few, because I use 1 old phone and an older SLR as cameras for FBT in VR.
Shit is kinda ridiculous that it doesn’t just show up in the OS as a fuckin’ camera without some “hacking.” It should literally work out of the box.
Could you share what software you have found to work with phones?
I have been using iVcam.
