donrisi
Offline
Image Upload: Off
|
 p.1 #3 · Tethered Nikon advice needed | |
You don’t mention your intended use, but I have used it for image review for portrait and some commercial uses. This is what I know:
What you need is Nikon's Camera Control Pro software. It will do exactly what you want. I have used it to view the raw images as I shoot, and love it. My clients love to be able to do that, too, which is very important.
It connects to the camera via a USB cable (you'll have to get an extension cable or two, depending on how far away your camera is from the computer. Not only will it display the images exactly the way you want it to, you can actually control the camera from the computer, should you want to.
You will have to remember to change your camera's USB setting from Mass Storage (which is used only to download images to the computer) to PTP (which is used to communicate with the computer through Camera Control Pro). I don't have a D3, so I don't know where in the menu system that control is, but on my D2h, it's under "Setup." You'll also have to tweak a couple of CCP settings to have it show the full frame image, but that's easy.
However, be aware of these things:
1. It is God-awful slow. I shoot compressed RAW, and even with my D2h, which creates relatively small RAW files, the computer cannot come close to keeping up, even shooting as slow as a frame every couple of seconds. As big as the D3's files are, I can't imagine waiting for them to transfer. My clients would fall asleep from bordom waiting.
2. You are limited to the length of the USB cable. USB will only travel just so far, then loose signal. You’ll need a cart or table nearby for the computer. I forget exactly what the maximum distance is, but I can only go about 16 feet.
3. I also find dragging the cable around a real pain in the neck, every bit as much as the old sync cords were before PWs. And I am forever living in fear of tripping over it, and either yanking the computer off the cart, or worse, ripping something up on the camera’s USB output. As a result, I waste a foot or two of cable length on each end trying to devise some sort of strain relief. What a pain.
My solution to these problems came from a gentleman named David Tejada (http://www.davidtejada.com). He uses a portable DVD player connected to the camera's video out jack. The images remain on the camera's card, and when either I or the client want to review, I just plug up, and hit the playback button on the back of the camera. (An added little benefit with my D2h is that the camera’s LCD screen remains hot, even when something is plugged into the video out jack. This means that I can hand the DVD player to my client, and let them look at it, while I look at the camera’s LCD screen. We’re seeing the exact same thing, without having to get too personal with each other, which keeps my wife happy.  ) When it’s time to shoot, I just unplug again.
The resolution of the DVD player isn't so great, but it's good enough to give both me and my client a good sense of what's going on. And since there is no lag time between shooting and download (because there is no download), the images can be viewed instantly.
Hope this helps. Good luck, and if you have any questions, feel free to PM me.
Don
Edited on Aug 07, 2008 at 05:19 PM
|
