Curt1591 Posted at 1-16 17:10
No; there are legal requirements.
Many Asian governments are paranoid. They don't want the ability to record in silence.
Could you be more specific? I’ve listed a number of Asian countries where the beep is not a legal requirement in an earlier post, and I’m wondering where you are getting your information from - Japan and Korea, yes, but they are not representative of the whole of Asia.
Here’s more information:
“There is no law that requires the shutter sound. It is an industry convention that developed in the early 2000s with the proliferation of feature phones equipped with high-resolution cameras. The three legacy carriers [in Japan], fearing possible government regulation, ordered their manufacturers to ensure that the shutter sound could not be suppressed.
The shutter sound is activated by the phone, based on the SIM that is inserted. The presence of the SIM indicates to the OS that this should happen: the OS selects carrier-specific settings based on the IMSI value of the SIM. Among these are things like 'show 4G instead of LTE', 'always show 3G, not 3G/H/H+', 'show 3G for 2G networks' (hi Sprint!), and 'always play the camera sound'. For iOS, this is controlled by carrier profiles built into the OS: therefore all unmodified iOS devices will experience the unmutable shutter sound when used with a Japanese SIM. Edit: iOS devices use the model number (country of first sale) to decide whether the shutter sound will be forced. The iOS image is the same for all devices. (MCC 440 = Japan; all IMSIs starting with 440 belong to Japanese SIM cards). Because this is in the standard Android open-source distribution, most devices will include it, and hence most will inherit the 'always play the shutter sound if used with a Japanese SIM' behavior. On Android, the shutter sound is played using the 'enforced audible' sonification strategy. Device implementers are supposed to ensure that these sounds always make it to the device speaker and are un-mutable, but it's not always tested properly.
Note that this is how the regulation is applied on mobile phones. I can see how/why OP would need to comply for it to be sold in Japan/Korea, but forcing the beep for all countries is not a good idea, From what I know, the beep is coded into handheld video cameras (consumer) sold in Japan/Korea, but the same model of camera sold internationally does not have the beep and since there is no GPS or component that would detect the location of the camera, such cameras would record without the beep. |