Camera owner asks Canon, skies: Why is it $5/month for webcam software?
Photography enthusiasts pay a lot for their very powerful cameras. How much more should they pay to put them to much, much easier work as a webcam? However many hundreds of dollars you paid, Canon thinks you should pay $5 per month—or, heck, just $50 per year—to do that.
Roman Zipp detailed his journey from incredulousness to grim resignation in a blog post. He bought his Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II for something like $900 last year. The compact model gave him the right match of focal length and sensor size for concert pics. What it did not give him was the ability to change anything at all about his webcam feed using Canon’s software. (The “$6,299 camera” referenced in Zipp’s blog post title is his indication that all models of Canon’s cameras face this conundrum, regardless of price point.)
Ah, but that’s because Zipp did not pay. If you head to Canon’s site, provide a name and email, and manage to grab the EOS Webcam utility when Canon’s servers are not failing, you can connect one camera, with one default scene, at 720p, 30 frames per second and adjust everything on the camera itself if you need to. Should you pay $5 per month, or $50 per year, you can unlock EOS Webcam Utility Pro (PDF link), which provides full 60 fps video and most of the features you’d expect out of a webcam that cost hundreds fewer dollars.
