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 will sometimes demand you 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. 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, 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.

"Software development isn’t free, and I’m happy to pay for software I use regularly," Zipp writes. "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. Aside from development costs, there’s no justification for a subscription model, particularly from a company earning nearly $3 billion in profit." The "$6,299 camera" referenced in Zipp's blog post title is his suggestion that all models of Canon's cameras face this conundrum, regardless of price point, he writes. This is not true, as Canon models, including the EOS R series and PowerShot V10, and specifically a $6,299 EOS R1, can work as a 1080p webcam without Canon's software, with a USB connection setting tweak. Zipp's pointed complaint, properly hedged or not, made the front page of Hacker News, where commenters immediately got sidetracked into a discussion of UK tariff laws on video equipment, sneakers, cookies, and ethanol. But further in, recommendations appear for the open source Magic Lantern camera add-on software, or possibly CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) firmware. Whether or not Zipp can better use his camera as a webcam is somewhat beside the point, or at least the point he's making. Many higher-end (or at least better-than-smartphone) cameras output video in formats that computers and web conferencing software cannot natively accept. HDMI output is an option, but using that typically requires a capture device and specialty software to mix and use it and that the camera provide "clean" HDMI out, with no overlays. The G5 X Mark II does seem to offer that and has a USB-C port. It also seems to work fine once the software is paid for. It's an open question whether Canon should provide this as part of the cost of the camera, one for which Zipp and many commenters have an answer. Ars has reached out to Canon for comment and will update this post if the company responds. This post was update on Jan. 31, 2025 to note, per astute Ars reader feedback, that not all Canon models have restricted webcam output, and to better frame Roman Zipp's blog post headline and argument. Ars regrets the error.