Canon Draws Fire for Charging Subscription Fee To Use Cameras as Webcams (romanzipp.com) 77
Canon is requiring users to pay a monthly subscription fee to fully use their cameras as webcams on computers. The company's new EOS Webcam Utility software restricts features like HD resolution, brightness adjustments and color correction unless users pay $4.99 monthly or $49.99 annually.
"drawing fire" (Score:2, Insightful)
Drug dealer draws fire for exploiting addiction.
Murderer draws fire for slaughtering innocent family.
You don't "draw fire" for doing inexcusable shit. You're garbage.
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:4, Funny)
Tell that to the CEO of UnitedHealth Insurance
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:1)
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:2, Flamebait)
His decisions were to deliberately kill people for shareholder value. That makes him particularly evil
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:2, Flamebait)
As an executive officer, if you have evidence that your product or policy is severely cancerous or leads to global climate disruption or otherwise kills thousands per year, and you devote resources and effort to denying and obscuring that evidence, youâ(TM)re evil.
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Dude, are you seriously asking this question?
"In what way is someone who's performing actions they know will kill people because it'll generate more profits if they die evil?"
That's your question?
Really?
Yes. Some of them are evil. Pharmacy CEOs... I think we've already established the Sackler family is evil, they even made a two-episode special of Leverage to point this out, that's how cartoonishly evil they are. Likewise Martin Shkreli is, by common consent, one of the most evil shits the world has ever se
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:1)
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:1)
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:1)
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He oversaw an insurance program with denial rates well beyond industry norms.
I don't call him evil just because he worked in insurance.
Re: "drawing fire" (Score:2)
Not really different. They're evil too.
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he was an evil person
Calling folks "evil" is a tactic used by extremists to dehumanize their adversary. Once you pronounce someone evil, you don't have to even consider anything they say from then on. Would you reason with an evil entity? Same tactic us used when people are called racists, commies, alt-right, transphobes, or whatever -ism or -phobe is the soup du jour.
The UHC CEO was one person. He had a board behind him supporting every move he made. He would have been fired if he hadn't cut costs, and they'd have put someone
Rent to never own! (Score:2)
I don't fully understand how anyone gives in to these companies that take what's already a somewhat premium device, that the end-user has to pay for up-front, then make all the features that you already paid for a forever charge after the fact. It's massive bullshit, but there seems to be no legal recourse against it other than just not buying the devices to begin with.
Re:Rent to never own! (Score:5, Insightful)
Brother [brother-usa.com] printers are pretty good. They treat their customers well too.
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Brother is starting a subscription service too. Be careful when buying them, some models come with a subscription enabled cartridge, and if you don't sign up, it simply doesn't work. I've been poking around at a new printer for home and stumbled across this recent "upgrade" since Brother has always been so highly spoken of.
Re:Rent to never own! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunate. Seems part of the standard business lifecycle though:
1. Enter an already-established market with a new product.
2. Be competitive by producing something high in quality and treating customers well.
3. Defeat the competition, or at least become one of the top players.
4. Cash in on your success by reducing quality and treating customers badly.
5. Maintain your position by erecting barriers-to-entry to new products, entering into illegal cartel relationships with competitors, or just buying all competitors.
6. Be the evil tyrant you were always destined to be.
Re: Rent to never own! (Score:2)
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Your printer stops printing when you stop paying HP. Even with ink currently in your printer.
You are right. (Score:3)
I saw "Cannon" and had kind of a reflex response given my own bad experience with Cannon printers in the past. This article is clearly about cameras, not printers. Not even weird all-in-ones that have a camera (if such a thing even exists).
Feel free to ignore my post.
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A camera with a builtin photo printer so as to produce an instant hard copy of the photo taken? I seem to recall Polaroid doing this decades ago.
Polaroid cameras were quite the game changer for amateur photography, it meant instant feedback on if there as a good photo shoot where as before it was kind of hit and miss. Of course traditional film was a valued technology as it allowed for multiple reproductions, and some measure of editing the photo before reproduction. To have an assurance of what was in t
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https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
https://old.reddit.com/r/assho... [reddit.com]
https://old.reddit.com/r/print... [reddit.com]
while you can block firmware upgrades to a printer you have, I assume new printers will be shipping with the locked down firmware.
Re: Rent to never own! (Score:2)
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I will me too that.
Re:Rent to never own! (Score:4, Interesting)
Or option 3 return it.
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And buy what? The cancer has spread. The entire camera industry is starting to nickel and dime users for every chance they get.
- Panasonic charges users to enable 4K 60 4:2:2 output. Apparently owning a professional grade camera doesn't make you professional anymore.
- Sony decided to charge $150 for V3 firmware updates of their Alpha cameras, because apparently the ability to add a custom gridline to the viewfinder should be 10% of the value of the entire camera.
- You can spend $3000 on a camera and not hav
Re:this is the first time Canon has done this (Score:5, Informative)
They're picking something which would piss of their core audience the least as a test run. Nobody uses the EOS Utility who is a photo professional. Hopefully there's enough of a blowback that they decide this was a bad idea.
The ironic thing is that I have at various times been part of their core audience, having spend at least $50k on Canon gear over the years, and the only reason I *can't* use EOS Utility is because the resolution for video sucks. I was one of the folks trying to get them to fix that during the pandemic, but in the end, I bought NDI capture hardware and optical HDMI cables.
For me, a subscription, even if it provided real 4K output (it doesn't), would be a hard pass. A 4K USB HDMI capture device costs $15. In the long run, it is way, way, way cheaper and easier to just throw hardware at the problem:
Factor in the added cost of running USB over any distance, and this basically wouldn't make sense for almost anyone even if it actually provided higher resolution.
But the best part is that it doesn't even provide higher resolution. It is an upscaler. You're paying money to use an upscaler that takes 1024x576 input from the camera and upscales it to 1080p. Exactly nobody should seriously consider paying for this. Apart from the limited remote control over aperture and focus (which are really not that interesting either, in practice, given the limited realistic range of USB), this is basically a "dupe the people who don't know any better" feature.
Getting actual higher resolution would require new camera firmware that takes the output of their hardware encoder and streams it over USB, and I get the impression that if the CPU were fast enough to do it reliably, they would have, so I wouldn't expect this to ever happen, realistically, which is why I was surprised to see this. But sure enough, it's just the upscaling feature that they announced a couple of years ago, which is just as uninteresting now as it was then.
If you want to be mad at Canon for something, be mad at them for not providing clean HDMI output on many of their cameras without turning off the on-screen display. That does far more harm than charging money for this largely uninteresting piece of software.
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No they aren't. They have pissed off everyone for a while now. Several professional grade features are locked away behind paid firmware updates. You want custom gridlines? $120. You want external display at higher resolution, or integrate with professional software like Dragonframe? That's $100.
They may be the first to add a monthly charge, but these companies all have enshitification cancer.
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I don't fully understand how anyone gives in to these companies that take what's already a somewhat premium device, that the end-user has to pay for up-front, then make all the features that you already paid for a forever charge after the fact. It's massive bullshit, but there seems to be no legal recourse against it other than just not buying the devices to begin with.
This is how you get open source software.
If there's a group of people fed up with the cost of some software needed to make their hardware work then at some point there will be people that believe the cost of maintaining subscription fees or some upgrade treadmill on software is more than the cost of their time developing some alternative software. As they are in the business of producing webcasts, or whatever, than developing software they choose to release what they have as open source and hope someone el
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This is how you get open source software.
Actually, gPhoto has supported Canon cameras since at least 2016, which is four or five years before Canon released their webcam software.
The only thing you're paying for that can't be obtained through open source is their software-based upscaler. And you'll get much better quality output with a $15 4K USB input dongle than you will from their upscaled 576p software.
Like I said elsewhere, I'm pretty sure this is Canon just trying to find a way to slightly reduce their losses from the software not becoming
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To be fair...this "pay for play" after purchase is, as far as I know as a Canon customer....NEW.
I think that's why it's raising so much at
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I'm pretty sure this isn't new. They added the upscaler a couple of years ago.
It also isn't useful. Anyone remotely serious is going to buy a $15 HDMI to USB capture dongle and use that instead of upscaling 1024x576 from the camera.
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I don't fully understand how anyone gives in to these companies that take what's already a somewhat premium device, that the end-user has to pay for up-front, then make all the features that you already paid for a forever charge after the fact.
Except for the fact that the DSLR cameras that this is used with never stated in the marketing literature or in the owner's manual that they could be used as a webcam. The utility just repurposed the remote shooting live view mode and made it available as a type of webcam.
Next on Youtube - Why you should never buy Canon (Score:5, Funny)
Annoy the influencers, go ahead, I dare you. Now where's my popcorn...
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Influencers are too busy using the premium features without paying, or only paying one months worth so they can make a video, post to YouTube, gain their monthly revenue check, and then later on follow up with a scathing video about the subscription when they're out of cash.
Rinse and repeat with each product without actually being offended, and profit on all fronts.
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Still entertaining. [grabs popcorn]
New? (Score:2)
Wasn't this released during lockdowns?
Did they put out a new version?
Is there no project on github that translates to UVC?
Which SLR cameras speak UVC natively? Mine is hooked up to an HDMI adapter but it's ancient. Good optics don't age much but old gear tends to overheat too.
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This software has been available for Canon cameras for over a decade.
Historically Canon nerfs it's own cameras by disabling recording on-device after 30 minutes. This makes it so that the device is classified as a Camera instead of a videocamera which has different taxation and tariffs. This has a huge effect on professional photographers that travel a lot. However the loop hole that professionals have been using forever is that you plug the HDMI into your own recording device like say a Atomos Ninja V and
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The funny thing is that the EU eliminated that extra tariff way back in 2019, but Canon never bothered to unlock the feature. So at this point, if you still have that limit on your Canon camera, it is because Canon wants you to pay more money to buy one of their video-oriented cameras, not because of any legal compliance reasons.
Enforced by software? (Score:2)
Someone will write open-source software to use the camera as a webcam. Until that happens, just don't buy the device.
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Don't even buy it then.
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Someone will write open-source software to use the camera as a webcam. Until that happens, just don't buy the device.
gPhoto predates Canon's software. This has already happened long ago. Like I said, you're paying for a software upscaler, nothing more.
Well, that makes MY mind up (Score:4, Interesting)
I need a new camera, and was thinking about Nikon (which has been my usual go-to), Canon or Olympus. I'd been hearing good things about Canon, and was kind of leaning that way. Now...nope. Off the list, now and until I see some evidence they've ditched that business model...probably forever.
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Nikon is no different. I own a Nikon and it is such a closed system. Impossible to get third party adapters that are fully functional. Canon was better in that respect, until now.
Re:Well, that makes MY mind up (Score:4, Informative)
Nikons marketing dept. made Nikon lenses get an expiration date, because otherwise lenses will work for generations. Nikon started putting RFID chips in lenses to brick Nikon camera bodies if you tried mounting a Nikon lens not concurrent with the body, to prevent people reusing lenses from their previous Nikon camera to force new lens purchases.
The answer was that Pentax chose to not only make camera bodies that worked with every one of their own lenses, of any age, they also made them work with Nikon and Canon lenses. Nikon lenses that won't even work on actual Nikons anymore due to DRM.
If any industry gets bad enough, someone will eventually make an open system that defeats all this closed system BS.
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what?
I own a lot of F-lenses dating back from 1979, older, newer, G lenses, etc.. and they all work with any body nikon used.
The good think about nikon was that if the lens is F-Mount, you can use any lens on any body.
And with the Z system, you can use the adaptor and use all the F lenses too (loosing autofocus in the screwdrive ones).
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No they didn't. You're talking entirely out of your arse. Virtually all Nikon lenses are compatible with virtually all Nikon bodies of the same mount, and often other mounts with adapters. Nikon added a couple of very key exceptions, such as firmware to detect if specific Nikkor PC lenses were mounted into incompatible cameras - where the rear element could at certain focus extend into the body enough to hit the mirror when taking a photo. I've only ever heard of 2 lenses affected.
Also RFID? Really? Precise
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But the glass that nikon produces is superb! almost makes the body an accesory of the lens.
You should probably strongly consider Canon (Score:1)
I've been doing stuff with high end cameras for years.
If you are just doing stills, you can probably go Nikon and be OK.
But if you plant to do any stuff with video you should strongly consider Canon. They have been leading for a while in that space, both in terms of hardware and software.
Even though this new subscription for webcamming is kind of absurd, don't shut yourself out of better tech just because of it... especially if you do not plan to use it for that.
However if you are interested in video it's
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Unfortunately you're not going to find much love from any camera manufacturer, they all have this cancer. Nikon has charged extra for a firmware upgrade enabling certain video output features for over 5 years now. Olympus released a whole new camera model which amounted to nothing more than a firmware update on their previous model (and some rubber on the dials). Sony charged $150 for the ability to customise the grid display.
Everyone is moving towards nickel and diming the user at every stage. If you're lo
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That actually brings things into perspective. Depending on shutter count, I might be happy with a lightly used, older DSLR. I'm not a fan of mirrorless, though I was going that way out of necessity. So maybe a Nikon D610 or something of that vintage would be my best choice. It's not like it will be getting the kind of workout my SLRs and DSLRs did before half-assed tolerable cellphone cameras were available to pick up the slack at birthday parties and such.
also useing linux or OBS can be seen an DMCA viola (Score:2)
also useing linux or OBS can be seen an DMCA violation that is not allowed.
Sony cameras do not (Score:1)
I own a Sony Alpha 7 III and I can easily use it as a webcam without paying a monthly tax. Although I found out that with a full-frame DSLR I am brining a tank to a knife fight. It is totally unnecessary. Most video conferencing software uses compression that makes image from my expensive DSLR indistinguishable from the camera built into my Mac.
Draws Fire? (Score:2)
I'm not excusing Canon's behavior - it's stupid, counterproductive, and exploitative. But if Slashdot posted an article for every time some guy had a gripe and put it on the internet...it'd be reddit.
Just say no (Score:3)
to software subscriptions
Companies are addicted to subscription revenue (Score:2)
It's ridiculous. Just SELL us something.
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Companies that are out of ideas and hitting the end of their useful life, start adopting such desperate measures to extend their life.
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Has to hurt that mobile phones have eaten 94% of the sales of cameras. There's no way they can keep up with the software innovations of Google and Apple. At this point, their boards are probably telling them to find revenue wherever they can or they are going to be sold for their patents.
Canon builds good cameras but so do others (Score:3)
For DSLR or anything full frame I'll stick with Nikon, Sony, Pentax or Olympus.
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All of the ones you listed have this cancer. Maybe not subscription service, but literally all of them nickel and dime you for a software update to unlock a capability your camera has, and most of them do it to some way or another with the video output. E.g. Nikon blocks the ability to send a high resolution preview to external recorders meaning if you're in the stop motion business you need to pay for a firmware upgrade to unlock the feature. Pentax blocks 4:2:2 video output on their cameras to make them i
how to flush your company down the drain (Score:1)
Sigh (Score:2)
And the total enshitification continues. Seriously, are people going to eventually stand up to this or not?
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Nope. The reason being, all manufacturers are doing something similar. Since you can't go to someone else, what's the point?
Second reason, the people buying this stuff, generally, have never known a time when you didn't need to have a subscription or account to do something. To them, it's all they know so they just go with it.
F this, and them (Score:2)
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Turning a physical object into a "service" should be regulated AF.
That's not what's happening here. During the pandemic, all the camera manufacturers rushed to try to push out firmware so that their DSLR and mirrorless cameras could be used as a webcam. Unfortunately, Canon cameras don't have a very fast CPU, and for maximum webcam quality and minimum latency, they were pushing MJPEG over USB 2.0, which resulted in just 1024x576 resolution, so nobody wanted to use it, but they felt compelled to release it anyway so that they wouldn't be the only company that didn't prov
It's okay by me (Score:2)
So.... (Score:3)
Webcams are, like, fifteen bucks on amazon?
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Yes you'll get the same quality from a $15 webcam as a 4k DSLR video output. Completely correct. There's absolutely no reason anyone should spend more than $15 on anything. We've reached peak webcam a long time ago.
In unrelated news can someone drive me the hospital tomorrow? I'm getting LASIK eye surgery and hoping at some point to be able to see clearly enough to get a drivers license of my own.
obvious scumbags gonna be obvious scum (Score:1)
ain't nobody surprised that shit is shit