Rant: Statism in your camera.

Miscellaneous General
1

It’s the little things that set me off. I could have complained about any state-sponsored crime against humanity, but I chose to write about this.

Camera Labs | Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 super-zoom review

Nice camera. Lots of great features. Two-thirds down the page:

There is however one important caveat for the European version of the Lumix FZ100, which has a maximum recording time of 29 minutes and 59 seconds per file to comply with tax regulations. But that’s still much longer than the 8 minute maximum of Motion JPEG.

The issue pops up on a couple photography forums:

DCResource.com/forums:

Don Schap: The last portion of this is IMPORTANT that you understand why it is 29 minutes. It is a European-restriction because of EU-taxing rules. If a video recorder records continuously longer than 29-minutes, 59-seconds … it is considered a “camcorder” and subject to a higher tax base. So, we are effectively SCREWED because of a European tariff regulation restriction, not something the camera is really not physically capable of … but a silly software instruction.

Thank you, Europe. Please notice “Land of the Free”, over here.

Who says politics do not play a role in our photography? Cripes, it is imposed in our friggin’ software and we are not even subject to the law!

Good man! Now get a good laugh at some of the lame responses:

dr4gon: What is you would want to record that’s greater than 29 minutes and yet less than the 2GB file limit size anyway?

David Metsky: No, [this limit is not being imposed by governments]. It is being imposed by Sony, who made a business decision to make a single product for multiple markets. Companies have lots of rules and regulations to contend with in various markets, it’s part of life in a multi-national marketplace. They make decisions like this for every product. … Sony could have chosen to make two products; one for each market. They could have chosen to accept the higher tariffs on their products. But stop blaming the EU, or for that matter, bringing politics to this forum again and again.

Rooz: if sony want to operate in a global world, then they follow global requirments. contrary to popular belief for some americans, there is a whole other world outside of your borders…and i dont just mean hawaii. … the amount of things, (and irrelevant things at that), you get your knickers in a knot over is staggering.

David Metsky: Please keep politics out of these forums. It doesn’t belong here.

Oh the servility!

2

SO what exactly is pissing you off, the tax regulation or the blind majority of the people that hate politics, well its more of an economic topic than politics…

3

Mainly the tax. Learning of the bizarre tax rule first set me reeling and researching. My main reason for posting was to alert people to yet another way the state influences the minutae of our lives.

But then reading the celebration of statism on that camera enthusiasts’ web forum gave me a second dose of reel. Egad. It reminds one of the mindset we’re up against. If a guy still can’t convince a forum of camera enthusiasts that the EU’s obsolete, formalistic legal distinction between ‘camera’ and ‘camcorder’ is inhibiting the development of the highest quality, lowest cost cameracorders, then we sure have a long way to go.

4

If it’s a software thing, has anyone come out with a workaround yet?

5

I just want to add EU countries also have an extra tax on recording medias (from cassette tapes to hard disks, from SD memory cards to USB memory devices) to “compensate” for media piracy. How this tax is “distributed”, nobody has a clue.

But if you want to laugh really hard… up to 1988, well before airbags became compulsory in Europe, Mercedes-Benz offered versions of their cars without airbags to consumers in some European countries. This wasn’t done to, say, offer a slightly cheaper product: in fact these models were more expensive than airbag equipped models and were made to order. It was done because back then airbags used a small charge of cordite (smokeless gunpowder) and in some States you needed to obtain a permit for carrying even such a small amount of explosive with you.