Comment by dspillett
> The company can charge whatever they want for this feature.
They can. But that doesn't mean everyone is forced to be happy about it, and doesn't mean it can't be talked about so other people who might not be happy about it can use the information to chose a different camera from a different manufacturer instead of discovering the issue post-purchase.
> they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI
Or the industry standards for video-over-USB, that this manufacturer chose not to implement because they couldn't easily gouge a subscription out of it.
OP bought a camera not sold as a webcam and is trying to use it as a webcam. Fair enough, I've done the same.
A standard way of doing that is to use a video cable to get video output and plug that into a capture card on your computer. OP doesn't want to do that and would prefer that the manufacturer included webcam functionality out of the box.
Also fair enough! But if that's the requirement, buy a camera that meets that requirement, and understand that it's not a standard feature in these cameras.
I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on. It's getting outraged over expecting a camera to do what it wasn't designed to do, when there are already simple and standard ways of making it do that.