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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Yep this is a neat trick too. Also I must say (as a hobbyist photographer myself) that even if you're on a budget, if you want to go the optical route, you can easily grab a cheap used DSLR like a Canon 60D which often goes for <$200 used, and slap on an old M42 Russian lens with a conversion adapter and get fantastic bokeh for video calls.

The mildly annoying part is most DSLRs don't have an AC adapter input to allow them to be constantly on, but you can buy a "fake" Canon battery that sits in the battery compartment and wires in AC adapter input.

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> The mildly annoying part is most DSLRs don't have an AC adapter input to allow them to be constantly on, > but you can buy a "fake" Canon battery that sits in the battery compartment and wires in AC adapter input.

Yeah, I left out that detail. One should also make sure that the camera has a clean HDMI output. I can't use my old EOS 500D for this since the HDMI output is grody with focus aids and stuff.

You don't even need to use HDMI or have a capture card; you can connect the camera with USB and use gphoto2/v4l2loopback to present it to the OS as a video input. With older cameras that have USB2, you will be limited to a lower bandwidth and resolution (200Mbps -> 1024x680), but it still looks fantastic, especially with high-quality lenses and shallow depth of field that enables video codecs to encode the out-of-focus-areas efficiently and concentrate on detail in the focal plane.

I experimented with the old 550D of my dad. I got a successful clean picture using either USB (canon supplies a "USB Webcam Software", though the 550D is not officially supported it works. I also managed to get clean HDMI out using "magic lantern" (a firmware modification for some canon DSLRs which enables a lot of hidden features, allows clean HDMI, and on a beta branch allows "simulated focus bubtton press" to keep the camera from shutting down due to inactivity)

Also overheating. I don’t know about the Canon but my Sony had to have a number of settings changed to keep the temp down, and even then on a hot day it’ll shut itself off.

You don't need to do either. Canon offers a webcam utility driver for free, which offers a clean interface via microusb->usb.

I don't know about Canon, but the Sony one is lower resolution than the HDMI capture. I was able to buy a cheap Chinese USB-HDMI capture card for like $8 and it works actually quite well, and is driverless.

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