I have had no heating problems whatsoever. Mostly its been in use for 1-2 hour sessions at a time, occasionally longer. I do turn the camera off in between though, so it's not turned on 24/7.

Most annoying is a bug in the Canon webcam driver, if the camera is switched off, it displays a static image, which somehow fully occupies a single core on my machine. I would have thought encoding a still image into a video stream should be doable with less cpu cycles.

Some models definitely overheat. Some models also don’t have clean HDMI output.

Basically, you can’t just buy a random mirrorless or SLR camera and hope it works. You have to pick from a smaller list of known-good setups.

> You have to pick from a smaller list of known-good setups.

Any recommendations for the cheapest second hand SLR one can buy to have streamer quality webcam feeds?

Grab an old Panasonic GH3 and the 20mm f1.8 lens. It looks great. This is a pretty decent list: https://www.elgato.com/en/cam-link/camera-check

Thank you!

Sony A6 series - yes.

Sony A7 series - no.

Fujifilm, any version - no.

Based on my (sparse) experience.

Not in my experience. I'm curious why you would you expect it to overheat?

Some cameras are not designed to record HD video during long periods of time.

Does it need to be recording? Perhaps you could just capture live HDMI output.

This is a confusion of terms. By "recording" people can mean both writing data to the card and activating the sensor to receive information. The latter is what overheats a camera, and the process is the same for both sending data directly to HDMI or recording it to a card. Some older sensors on Canon digital SLRs would actually begin to burn themselves out just by having the screen display what the sensor was receiving (also known as "live view") for more than about 10 minutes.

If the camera wasn't designed for video the sensor can over heat as it takes power to drive it.

Yes, that is only one of the hassles with this approach. When it works it does look great however.