Comment by donatj
2 years ago
Like most head scratchers, it’s EU taxes.
The import taxes are higher on video cameras than still cameras, so they artificially limit the length of videos you can record to avoid being classified as a video camera.
> Video camera recorders are subject to import duty of 4.9% or 14%, still image cameras are duty free.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...
(Update: included better link)
In Nathan For You, they try to dodge export taxes on smoke detectors by classifying them as a musical instrument. They went as far as creating a band with a "hit song" that features a smoke detector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN_ElpaabJU
Seems like that tax has been scrapped though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B9GLrJoUA8 So like other commenters point out, at this point it’s more likely to be market segmentation. Sony and Canon, for example, make professional video cameras that are very similar to their photo cameras, but have extra video-centric features i.e. built-in ND filters, connectors for professional battery packs, XLR audio connectors etc. They want to give users extra reasons to buy these models (although Sony apparently removed the limit recently, so looks like they’re moving away from this strategy).
That reminds me of how Converse Chuck Taylors have a small layer of fuzz on the bottom of the sole that wears away after a wearing it for a bit.
Seemed totally bizarre, until you learn that it was so they can be classified as "slippers" which had a much smaller import tax than sneakers.
It still astonishes me that a legal hack like that works.
https://www.gearpatrol.com/style/shoes-boots/a715423/convers...
It's because they're trying to essentially legislate taxonomy, which is nearly impossible.
It's the impetus behind the question "Is a hotdog a sandwich?" What does it mean to be a sandwich? What are the properties of sandwichness? When does something stop being a sandwich?
What's the line between pasta and bread? Bread and cake? Shoe and slipper? The fact that all fruits are vegetables, but not all vegetables are fruits, but it turns out most of them are, in fact, fruits, and half our fruits are actually nuts or some shit.
So to put an exemption on a "slipper", you have to rigidly define what a slipper is. Because "yeah, that's a slipper" doesn't pass muster. Because you and I can disagree on what a slipper is. On where the line between slipper and shoe is. But if we legally define a slipper as any article of clothing designed to be worn on the foot with a felted or cloth sole. Boom, we have something we can agree on. As long as the item meets all of the legal qualifications, it's legally a slipper. And we can fuck subjectivity right out the window.
But of course, where there are rules, there are games. And the goal of the game is to get as much as possible while giving up as little as possible.
RE>> Because "yeah, that's a slipper" doesn't pass muster.
[Justice Potter Stewart has entered the chat]: "I know it when I see it". "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
> It's the impetus behind the question "Is a hotdog a sandwich?"
It seems like that's the "every hot-dog is a sandwich but not every sandwich is a hot dog" thing
> What's the line between pasta and bread?
Leaveners
> Bread and cake?
Sugar content
But I think question here is why products for such similar use have such different taxation ? Why video is taxed more than pictures ? What purpose does it serve?
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To be fair, I wear mine like slippers. Haven't tied 'em in months, let's say I'm lazy.
It’s always interesting to find what businesses will do to lower these. My favorite is Converse sneakers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-converse-sneakers-...
Reminds of the time when Britain's finest legal minds were paid exorbitant fees to resolve the extremely important question of whether a particular brand of sugary snack should be considered a "chocolate-covered biscuit" or a "chocolate-covered cake". The taxman must get what's his!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes
The American version is trucks that have extra seats added which are then removed once imported, ready to be used on the next truck to be imported.
So this is like Sony adding Linux as an option to the PS3 to make it a "general computing device" instead of a "game console" and getting a lower duty percentage?
Spain used to have an extra import tax on home computers with <=64KB RAM. One manufacturer got around it by including an extra 8KB chip on a daughterboard (not electrically connected at all!) to increase the RAM to 72KB and avoid the tax.
...Why would they tax extra ones with smaller memory ? Was there actual reason specified somewhere ?
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This is almost as stupid as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
>At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.
I didn't know the British used to be so cool.
Bricking up your windows to own the Liberals.
(You can still see this on old buildings, some were never restored to use as windows)
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That may explain why it is exactly 30 minutes, but, despite some counterexamples, that we don't see more product differentiation enabling the consumer to choose between a camera with the limit and an "upgraded" model (i.e. the same camera with the limit disabled) suggests that underlying that the manufacturer recognizes that the consumer would rather buy under-specced hardware that can't handle much more than 30 minutes of recording than pay more for a design that had the engineering effort to handle unlimited recording put into it. Those who truly have a need for unlimited recording are likely to want something video-centric in design anyway.
I expect the answer is all of the above and more.
Not really. The 30 minute limitation applies on even very high end DSLRs, but in practice this doesn't matter, because this isn't quite how DSLRs are used for video work.
In practice, video is done by using the HDMI output of the camera which will spit out continous 4k output without the 30 min limit, and without all the issues of needing to flush this to CFe/SD/XQD cards. You then caputre it on either a laptop or stand alone video capture device which will have functionally limitless storage. The sensor and processing engine is still running the whole time though, which means the camera needs to be specced to handle this (and they are). The only limitation is that you can't record to the internal storage, and as explained that doesn't matter.
A number of high end (still-centric) cameras are known for overheating problems during recording, even before the 30 minute mark is reached.
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In general for things like memory management and thermal management, if a handheld device is going to hit its limits, it'll do so well before the 30 minute mark.
Either your thermal solution can remove the heat of your CPU going at full power, or it can't. And if it can't it'll hit the limits in 5 minutes not 30 minutes, unless it's a huge water-cooling system or something like that.
The main exception here is batteries - but lots of fancy cameras offer things like battery grips for people who want to shoot for hours on end.
Price discrimination is probably another, there’s a huge price jump between home video and production video equipment.
Pretty much everything in the audio and video space has a big price gap between "pretty darn good these days" and "pro."
Finally. The first _good_ reason for Brexit.
Don’t know about that. Brexit only created yet another tax/regulatory domain that companies have to negotiate.
There are so many different ones already that one more doesn't matter very much. If you are a poor country getting rid of them matters, but UK is rich/important enough that plenty of companies will find it worthwhile to navigate and so they don't loose much. Poor countries are a small market and so if it hard to navigate companies will give up as there are not enough rich people there to be worth the effort, and so banding together means your rich are combined with the rich in other poor countries and so it is more likely that you have enough that it is worth navigating the regulations.
Don't get me wrong, Brexit was a bad thing. My reply is strictly about things that are made by large companies outside of Europe. Skip any of those qualifiers and things change.
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Because you really want to record movies longer than 30 minutes on your phone?
Not even sure if the UK has changed this already.
I really want technology to be as good as it gets, not as good as tax/tariff law allows.
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And what's the current UK import duty on camcorders?
Looks like 0% for all items under 8525 under the new Global Tariff (i.e for countries with which the UK trades under WTO terms). It would be 0% for countries with an FTA as well, of course:
https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/headings/8525
The distinction in law between sub-30 and 30+ minutes still exists, inherited from EU law, but the tariff is 0% in both cases:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/classifying-electrical-equipment...
Summary of the changes from the "Common External Tariff" of the EU to the "UK Global Tariff":
"The net effect of the tariff regime according to a summary by the Department for International Trade is as follows:
- 47% of products will be tariff-free, compared to 27% under the CET and
- Average tariffs will be reduced from 7.2% under the CET to 5.7% under the UKGT
This is achieved through changes to rates of tariff by lowering rates, reducing rates to zero or rounding rates down."
Funny how bureaucratic nonsense from a comparatively small population can have such a ripple effect across a global industry.
Folks all over the world have to settle for an inferior product specifically because EU wanted a slightly juicier import tariff. It's cases like this I'm sympathetic to my more libertarian countrymen. Who genuinely thinks the consumer is better off because of these 'protections'?
But why are there such high import duties for something they don't even manufacture? There's no domestic industry to give an advantage to through this.
Well, there is ARRI although I doubt all their parts are locally-sourced :D
> The Commission is not aware of technical limitations to those devices developed by the industry to evade import duties.
Maybe they should read Hacker News.