lots of digital cameras have video out to show photos on your tv. they can also be used to show the actual picture of theit display on the tv-screen. on the other hand there are those capture cameras which need no capture card and use USB input, to get films on your pc or to use them for video conferences and so on. i wonder if any digital camera for taking photos with USB is capable to do the same thing. (yes i know there was an article where they wrote that you can use your cam as a webcam if you write an applescript - i have a pc and as far as i know webcam means a lot of time between the pictures. thats not what i'm writing about.) it should not be such a big thing if you look how cheap those little capture-cameras are. so at least it might not be implemented in the firmware of your camera because they want you to buy those other things in addition (at least they want you to spend as much money as possible on lots of different products, i'm sure that's why they stopped the project about putting mpeg capture into the toshiba pdr-m4; it would have been too good with it). video capturing via usb was a feature i would like to have when i'm going to buy a digicam. please let me know any information about this. thank you in advance, joern.

-- Joern Lewin (j.lewin@tu-bs.de), January 11, 2000

Answers

The discussions I've seen on this issue ended up like this -- the dedicated tethered vid cams are so cheap that it's not worth bothering getting your digicam to double as one. Most digicams don't come with an AC adapter, and you'd probably have to buy one to do this, the cost of which would come close to the tethered cam. :) So far digicam makers aren't taking this seriously as a feature to work

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), January 12, 2000.

I read in somebody elses response to the same question here that the CCD and other circuitry in a digicam can't withstand the long periods of being turned on that are required for a web cam. Too much heat buildup. As Benoit mentioned, the web cams are so cheap, why bother?

-- Don Edgar (deldon@hotmail.com), January 12, 2000.