You can apply the following answer to 95,99% of questions why a company is asking x price for y service/product:
Because enough people are paying it (because reason z)
Copying my comment from another thread on the topic
Probably because the software team is under a different cost center than the hardware/camera team, and they weren’t generating revenue. So the idiot assholes at the top of the SW side said “we can monetize our webcam software” and a bunch of people agreed so they could look relevant and keep their jobs. Capitalism!
I don’t understand why anyone needs a software to achieve this in the first place? I’ve hooked the camera’s HDMI out to some cheap random USB-C HDMI capture card, and use OBS to record the stream. Easy, uncompressed, no restrictions to whichever settings their software lets you access.
Can you use that in videocalling apps?
There is a vitrual cam for OSB that spoofs the OBS output to a webcam you can use in zoom/teams/etc
I used a lot during covid.
I guess it depends on the app, but I just checked and both Skype and Teams show me the capture card as input source, and the preview picture looks fine. So I’m pretty sure it works in an actual call, though I haven’t tried it yet.
Both apps heavily compress the video signal though, even if you set the quality to 1080p, so I doubt it makes a huge difference compared to a regular webcam.
The advantage of a camera is the lens, not the resolution
For a video call, I’m not sure that really matters a whole lot, but I guess that depends on the use case.
You’re kinda explaining Canon’s logic here though - they want you to pay for “convenience”.
So the $5 is the idiot tax then - for people that can’t figure it out themselves. Scummy as fuck when they could just out a youtube tutorial instead.
Gavin Free once did this with a Phantom Flex4K. Took him forty minutes bodge together. Surprisingly, a $150,000 slow-motion video camera does not offer generic webcam drivers, out-of-the-box.
