Certainly not arguing that it's difficult. It's extremely trivial. It just makes no business sense for the camera manufacturer. The CCD is a generic chip tha

Certainly not arguing that it's difficult. It's extremely trivial. It just makes no business sense for the camera manufacturer. The CCD is a generic chip that spews clocked image data over some serial connection. Keep it simple and generic, and ship to any business who wants it. You can have a camera controller IC/ASIC/FPGA/µcontroller one step up from the CCD that manages the CCD and LEDs. That would have either firmware or hardware support for LEDs, but you'd still imagine that it would be configurable for cases where there is no LED installed. It's absolutely possible, and I don't know all the options out there, but I can't imagine a manufacturer shipping an off-the-shelf IC that _always_ ties an LED to CCD operation.