Imaging Edge Webcam | Hacker News Reader

Imaging Edge Webcam

support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp

41 pointswoldemariam37 comments

... and I'd love to have this if it just modified the firmware of my camera to act as a webcam native webcam.

As is, this is a cumbersome kludge.

Perhaps future cameras will have this option. But I doubt it. My expectation is that the camera market will continue to shrink as companies like Sony have completely missed the concepts of ecosystems, open standards, compatibility, and people wanting to do anything Sony didn't predict. At the same time, the imaging market will continue to grow with lower-quality but standard, compatible devices like cell phones and webcams.

It also leaves most A-mount users out. Even cameras one generation back are left out (A99, A77). Sony basically shat on its entire userbase in the move to E-mount. Perhaps Canon, Nikon, or Panasonic will pick them up. But I doubt that too.

There's an increasingly narrow niche which big cameras are forcing themselves into. Older users aren't always moving from dying mounts. Newer users expect apps and interoperability. I'm wondering how much longer this whole house-of-cards will last.

Olympus just gave up claiming "market conditions." The problem is always outside....

Sony is using the Canno EF playbook and it's working. The E mount is also by far the most open FF ILC system available.

To the extent dominating a collapsing market can be called "working"

* Digital camera makers sold over 120 million units in 2010

* This was down to under 20 million units in 2020.

* 2019 was around 15 million.

2020 was starting down from there, even pre-COVID, and I think COVID.

And it is the most open player, much like Symbian used to be for cell phones.

I prefer to use my cell phone to my big cameras for no reason other than not having to mess with things like memory cards. That's all stupidity by the camera makers. There's no reason the devices can't play well in an ecosystem. I can spend 5 minutes futzing around to get a camera to use my cell phone as a remote.

> My expectation is that the camera market will continue to shrink as companies like Sony have completely missed the concepts of ecosystems, open standards, compatibility, and people wanting to do anything Sony didn't predict. … Newer users expect apps and interoperability.

I think Sigma is getting it right. FP can natively act as a regular webcam. From get go, they are publishing an SDK for developers and 3D models of the body and all accessories as STEP files for accessory makers. Frankly, their approach is a breath of fresh air.

Sigma seems to get everything right.

They're cameras are a bit niche. That makes sense for a minor player, but I'm not in their niche.

I think if they made one a bit more mainstream, with:

* a native mirrorless mount * converters to take A-mount, F-Mount, and EF-Mount lenses natively (and perhaps more)

they'd sell like hotcakes, though. Sigma just might do it. Even out of feeling bad for Alpha users left out in the cold by Sony, and be surprised when people buy it.

Frankly I’d be more than fine if Sigma did not spend effort on adding another mount (M lenses, EF lenses can be adapted to L) and instead focused on their full-frame Foveon body or came up with something else crazy and uncompromising. I love to bits their maverick approach.

Soo many questions.

Why is this not a firmware addition? Why is this windows only? Why the ILCE-5100, but not the ILCE-6000 which is _super_ popular? Why is the PlayMemories App stuff still a unusable mess?

Sorry, was maybe a nice idea in the beginning, but the execution is disappointing. I'll stick to my capture cards and stay on the lookout for a proper camera. The zcam e2-m4 is looking better every day I have to work with this stuff...

Not having the 6000 is a real bummer since I was just getting excited to use mine as a webcam. It’s a shame... I remember my first digital camera was some 1.3 MP point-and-shoot more than 15 years ago and it was well capable of using it as a webcam.

> Why is this not a firmware addition?

Have you ever played with the firmware on an A7S2 or one of the old jailbreakable models? That's why: while it may be based on Linux with some weird Android layer on which PM apps are based, it is an utter UTTER mess.

Sony is a camera company, not a software company, and it shows in whatever they touch.

I would have said "what about the playstation" but thats kind of a mess too.

You are right and it's mind-boggling how they do it.

No answers here... for me the meta-question is why are they so bad at user-facing software? (I don't really know about the quality of the firmware, it gets the job done, I guess). I like their cameras -- I own an NEX5N, a6000 and an RX100 -- but interacting with their mobile and desktop apps is always such a terrible experience.

My theory is most of imaging software & hardware is in Japan, and software is not a strong point there since it doesn't pay well. I bet it would be better if they could pay like FANG. Instagram alone probably make more money than the entire photography industry.

Samsung NX was going towards the 'smartphone pro camera' that we should be at by now, but they pulled out because they probably saw the future of it.

Hardware companies never do software well. It's a freebie.

Strangely, some are starting to do software better -- so they can monetize data they collect.

I wouldn't say never. But it really comes down to how a business views their product. If they view it as a hardware product that is supported by some software, then it will be shit. If they view it as a whole end-to-end solution where the entire experience is the product, then they will more often do it well.

Photography is weird in that the people still buying cameras pretty much just want the same old Canon/Nikon controls and menus that they are used to, and have a workflow already in place. It is really difficult to get these people out of that mindset even though it would be amazing if you were able to take a photo, it would get automatically uploaded to the cloud, where you can access and edit/publish it through any device. Even though this would benefit a lot of professionals, many wouldn't want to change their workflow to allow this.

At this point I would just buy a $12 HDMI to USB dongle and side step the need for any of these apps. Way better, no new software required, no OS specifics.

Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daS5RHVAl2U

This didn't exist at the beginning of the pandemic.

The entire setup for mounting my fairly expensive A6000 Sony camera was a little under 75 bucks except for the hdmi to usb dongle that shot up hundreds of dollars from its fairly expensive base. I was totally on the fence for months about buying, thinking maybe I could get into twitch or something to justify it since the price wasn't just totally out of reach. It seemed like newer models had work arounds and I was just going to have to bite the bullet for being an early mirrorless adapter.

Then those dongles came out. Work perfectly for every use case a regular consumer would need one for.

I own Sony cameras and like them, but all the software they make to connect to the camera is bad period. They should just enable the camera to act as a webcam via firmware update.

Was pretty surprised no mac option or even a timeline for mac availability but looking at the resolution supported which isn’t even HD seems we are not missing out on much and more just a feature that want to be able to say they have like the competitors even if not useable.

SIGMA fp works as a UVC camera, out of the box and without special drivers[0]

[0]: https://blog.sigmaphoto.com/2020/the-sigma-fp-as-a-live-stre...

Aside from the lens, sensor size, and the huge amount of power to run a consumer camera compared to a webcam on your laptop, are there major differences in the output format or video processing? Turning one into the other always seems like such a big deal/problem.

Yes, it’s a massive difference in quality. Feature films will often incorporate video shot with e-mount APS-C cameras. Live TV is often streamed using HDMI capture decks like Blackmagics, coming from cameras not too different from consumer mirrorless cameras.

You can properly control a dSLR or mirrorless. You can determine exact aperture, field-of-view, exposure, etc. That's helpful if you're doing any sort of machine vision. Webcams have more controls than normally exposed, but you still can't e.g. swap out a lens for a different focal length.

Sensor driver ICs operate in different modes for still and video, so probably developer culture between different trains of cameras diverged due to that, earlier in the technology.

Cameras are also still a bag of trickster type computer, lots of ASICs talking. “Main CPU” is probably still a thing. So disturbing the path from light to FAT file entry may or may not open some can of worms.

Lastly I can’t imagine a team of Linux hackers in a large Japanese corporate writing UVC gadget driver for company platform... entertainment value and frictionless operation are very neglected/disincentivized part of engineering in the country.

Maybe the second point is the most relevant. They’re not designed to encode and export video to PC and that itself is a challenge.

Ah, super interesting and that's what I was curious about.

Yes, I imagined that there were a lot of written specs requested from the group responsible for building this app/interface...

If the raspberry pi with its new 12MP sensor could run as a webcam, someone could make a ton of money packaging them up for HN users.

=========

EDIT - for a Mac

The sensor size does make a huge difference. Images from an APS-C or Full-Frame sensor do stand out.

I don't see why it couldn't. There's already a UVC USB Gadget driver in mainline Linux and the rest is just a matter of beating the video stream into submission using Gstreamer or something similar. But just the BOM alone would cost well over 100€, which can usually get you a used compact camera and one of those dir cheap capture cards everyone is talking about these days and is probably comparable in quality but actually has things like autofocus and a decent zoom range.

/me pats his antique PowerSchrott with CHDK...

No mic so it’s sort of half baked.

Camera mics are trash, if you care enough to use a Sony camera as a webcam you probably have a microphone you were already using.

Unfortunately, Windows only.

Prays for Archlinux support.

Yeah, no. I don't think I've ever seen any kind of support for Linux from Sony. I have to dust off my ancient windows laptop whenever I want to upgrade the firmware on my cameras.

Looking at the camera list and the fact it doesn't need new firmware, they're probably just using the existing tethering preview functionality.

The same can be achieved with gphoto2 piped to v4l2loopback (using ffmpeg to transcode). Something like:

    $ sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 
    
    $ gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video0

I think this is essentially the same thing Nikon is doing as well with the beta webcam utility.

Take the Sony logo, cover the lower half and invert it. Don't comment on your findings.

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