You can't use your $6,299.00 Camera as a Webcam. That will be $5

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

> and they should—due to the lack of standards—provide software that allows you to use their cameras as intended.

There is a standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class

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.

The Louis Rossman video on this, which hasn't been made yet - is already playing in my head.

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.

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

Right there with the infamous $18 BMW heated seats subscription

> 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.

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?

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.

Canon truly is the HP of cameras.

Good thing there's Sony and Nikon.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

> 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?

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?

Don't buy Canon. They've also been very shitty about third party lenses

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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/

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).

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

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?

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.

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...>

I know this isn't the point but investing in a usb capture card will permanently solve this issue for all future cameras.

Why $6,2999 when the article says he payed around $900?

It's actually worse than the title suggests. It's $5 per month! I wonder what justifies this recurring cost.

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.

Today I had trouble using OBS Software with my suite of old MacBooks, IPhones and iPads… I thought keeping them would be useful

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 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.

This model is not listed as supported, but generally gphoto2 can do the webcam thing for DSLRs.

http://gphoto.org/doc/remote/

5$ to unblock such a feature is already infuriating. But when you read the article, it explains it’s 5$ PER MONTH.

Is this like how I have to pay my mobile carrier to use my own phone as a wifi hotspot?

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.

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

> $5/mo, $50/yr

A one time payment would have been inconvenient, I assumed that based on the title; but that’s even worse.

Amazing the market share Canon has considering how bad they are at software.

"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...

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!

_____________

1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2251993/the-nightmare-is-rea...

2. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...

Yikes. Searching around a bit, it seems people frequently use an Elgato capture card or similar to interface with OBS

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.

I guess someone higher up said “well, someone who has forked out over $6k won’t even blink for an additional $5”

The software in the article looks like a fun little oldschool cracking/RE project.

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.

Is chdk still a thing?

>> 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.

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?

What sort of society are we careening toward? More power to the hackers!

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.

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?

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-...

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.

I know, some things you don't know beforehand, but by buying this you endorse this greed. You make it perpetuate. Don't

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

People need to start referring to those products with the "Enshittified" suffix.

That's the Canon G5 X II Enshittified.

Easy solution, don't use macOS.

What did you expect from proprietary software?

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.

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.

Wait until you hear about Canon printers.

Canon can GTFO, this nonsense profiteering should be illegal, and probably will be eventually. It's hostile to customers and will be received poorly.

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.

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 :)

[1] https://alphauniverse.com/gridline-license/

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.

> 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!