Can I Damage My Camera By Using It As A Webcam?

There’s a rumour on the internet that using a camera for a long duration of time can cause damage its sensor. Not only is this rumour based on very old technology, it’s also incorrect. Don’t worry — your camera is safe!

Modern cameras are designed with long sensor use times in mind, and have a great deal of heat management capacity. These cameras can operate for a very long time while recording high-resolution video, then encoding that video using computationally-heavy codecs like h.264 before writing it to storage. Streaming live view using Cascable Pro Webcam is a lighter workload on your camera than recording video to storage, and typically causes the camera to produce less heat.

If your camera does start to get too warm (say, you end up using it for a very long time with Cascable Pro Webcam in direct sunlight on a hot day), your camera’s internal sensors will detect this well before any damage is able to occur and stop the live view stream. At this point, Cascable Pro Webcam will show your configured test card in your webcam stream and you can fix the problem.

If you are particularly worried about heat, or you’re situated in a particularly warm environment, you can take some steps to reduce the amount of heat in your camera:

• Make sure the camera isn’t positioned in direct sunlight.

• Make sure the camera isn’t positioned in a locally-warm area. For instance, some models of iMac and many external displays vent heat from a slot along the top of the back side of the unit. If you camera is positioned directly above that vent, it could be getting warmer than it otherwise would.