So, today I finally got confirmation by german customs, that the Chronos
won't be classified as a "video camera", at least in my case, at least for the foreseeable future (maybe, no guarantees. But german customs declarations older than 3 years aren't re-opened/re-classified, due to a statute of limitation at that time).
When I recieved the Chronos 1.4 back in early September 2017, I had to fill out a customs form at the door with DHL and paid the german import tax right there. This made DHL my "legal agent" for german customs and they relayed my item declaration along with those taxes.
Right then and there, I classified the Chronos as "Digitalkamera", a term mostly understood as a digital photo camera, taking pictures, maybe capable of taking short videos, etc. (There is a reason, why most/all photo cameras aren't capable of continuous recording times of more than 30 minutes! This is
one of the characteristics of a true video camera, to record audio and video beyond that mark).
For me, it was (
and actually still is) not a true video camera because:
- no sound recording capability (yet). Honestly, at 10k+ fps, sound is irrelevant anyway.. all you'd get would be a very low hum, even on breaking glass
- no possibility to record more than 30 minutes of realtime footage (not sure if the first firmwares allowed less fps per resolution, then. I didn't know that this was even possible for a while), at least when used according to its proper purpose (say HD res at 1500 fps, or even 500 - 1000 fps)
- no actual video is stored internally, it's
plain images, shot very rapidly, much like continuous drive mode on a good photo camera. You need to, in a second, manual step, either
export those images or let the camera compress the image sequence into a video (accepting some quality loss), at that time.
After starting a new recording, or on power-off, the image sequence is permanently erased, a true video recorder works differently as well, here (you aren't
forced to erase each recording before recording a new scene)
Long story short: The Chronos (1.4 at least) was successfully re-classified as "Digitalkamera", "Warentarifnummer/Taric-nr.": 8525 8030 000
All the best
Martin