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Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

romanzipp.com

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Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#301

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 generall…

Would this approach also give you control of camera settings? I think the OP's situation, he wanted that.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#302
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.…

All those make sense and are pretty common: bread is taxed lower than most pizza toppings.

Raw ingredients are taxed less than ready-to-eat or sugar-coated ultra-processed good. And I'm totally ok with that.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#304
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...

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you say about innovation has been true mostly in the distant past and mostly for technologies that are used in business-to-business products. For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar. Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better st…

In the OLED example people were indicted in 2018 and went to prison in 2023 or 2024. You are making it seem like it’s an old story, but it’s not really true.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#306
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#307
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

>Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung?

That was Japan's game to lose and their loss was absolutely deserved. Japanese companies are more interested in bickering with each other, while Korean and Chinese companies have bigger worldly goals.

Japan Display[1] and Renesas[2] could have been the LG/Samsung had Japan realized much sooner that there are better things to be doing than dragging each other down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Display

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renesas_Electronics

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#308
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#309
"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...

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#310
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.

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