[JPT]

Yup, y'd think it would be a no-brainer.

Sony cameras with Wifi can be set up to do it, Canon quickly pushed out a firmware update to stream out of the USB port in to a PC or Mac or even a phone!

Sony has released the brand new Xperia Pro phone that does HDMI in and can control and upload media in the background off a Sony MILC's USB while viewing the image by the HDMI.

Pentax would need to fix the Video firmware before they could add any sort of streaming output, which honestly, should be possible at 720 and 1080 via the USB2, or 720 alone via the WiFi enabled SD Cards

A firmware update like this would be useful, but I was talking about Ricoh (or any other camera maker) getting into the dedicated webcam business. When you look at the market, it's mostly Logitech and unknown Chinese brands. Webcams have become such essential items that I think there must be space for more upmarket webcams. Even if Canon just put the guts of a low-end point and shoot in a webcam body with "Canon" written on it, I bet they would sell a ton on the brand value alone.

Anyway, the conclusion to my story was that I gave up on the idea of using the K-01 and just went for a Logitech C922 webcam to sit atop my monitor. It is USB powered and doesn't require any kind of stand. It's a lot better than the internal webcam on my computer, especially in low light, but it doesn't blur the background like an ILC would be able to. The only problem is not all of the control software works on M1 Macs yet, so I'm not getting all the features a Windows user would.

[i_trax]

Pentax is not a good choice for that kind of activities.
Perhaps you can look at Polycom
Poly | Video Conferencing, Conference Phones & Headsets | Poly, formerly Plantronics & Polycom
there is definitely a reseller in Japan.

[PiDicus Rex]

Anyway, the conclusion to my story was that I gave up on the idea of using the K-01 and just went for a Logitech C922 webcam to sit atop my monitor.

The 920 and 922 are good webcams, the only real limitation of then is logitech not offering narrower lens angles,,.

I use a Sony VG900E full frame camcorder with Pentax KM 35mm F2, feeding the HDMI output in to a HDMI-to-RTSP converter, in to a PC running vMix, and then NDI out from there to my laptop using the Newtek NDI Virtual Input to make the NDI feed appear to Zoom as a webcam.


The combination of the 35mm and FF sensor, give a shallow enough DoF to blur out the background, and just narror enough to not have a distorted face.

The rest of the setup allows me to add feeds from any of my IP based cameras, along with adding graphics, replaying videos, or using the NDI Screen Capture utility to turn a desktop in to another video source as if it's a camera.