Comment by brushfoot

It's a workaround for the camera not bundling all the features that it needs to be a webcam, absolutely.

The standalone cameras I've used haven't included free webcam functionality and I don't think that's outrageous, but apparently many people here who've been downvoting me disagree.

Personally, I think HDMI is great for A/V tasks that a camera doesn't support out of the box since it's a widely supported standard.