Shooting tethered with Nikon D2X

[Henry Goh]

I did not shoot tethered when I was using Nikon only.  Then when I started using 1DsMKIII, I shot tethered most of the time.  Today, I bought Nikon Camera Control Pro V2.40 and was very disappointed to find that images from my D2X take a long time to show up on my screen for both Win XP and Macintel.  For the 21Mp CRW2 file, it takes only 2 secs to display on C1 Pro 4.6.2 screen.  With Nikon, it takes about 14 secs just to show up in the viewer of Camera Control.

Is this the expereicne of other users here who have shot both brands?  I really want to be able to shoot tethered with Nikon also and especially when I'm planning to buy a D3X in the near future.  Please share your experience and if you know of any way to improve on this, kindly let me know.  Thanks.

[Henry Goh]

Is there no one shooting tethered with Nikon?

[jeremyrh]

Is there no one shooting tethered with Nikon?

Could try asking on nikonians.org ??

[AxelR]

Is there no one shooting tethered with Nikon?

14 sec is not normal. I don't know about CCP2 specifically, but shoting tethered over USB2 should be a lot quicker than that. Perhaps the USB port was operating at slow speed for some reason? I've tried with D40, D2Hs and D3 using some Windows software I wrote and the time is dependant on the image mode selected in-camera (JPG transfer quickly, then compressed raw, then raw, then raw+JPG and finally TIFF, not surprising as there is more data to transfer). The lag is also dependant on the memory card speed as the camera writes the image to the CF first, then notifies the host of a new picture arrival (but it is possible that CCP2 bypasses the memory card and only saves the file in the computer). If you are on Windows you might want to check FastPictureViewer, ask for a pro evaluation and see for yourself if it works any better.

Hope this helps,
Axel

[BernardLanguillier]

I did not shoot tethered when I was using Nikon only.  Then when I started using 1DsMKIII, I shot tethered most of the time.  Today, I bought Nikon Camera Control Pro V2.40 and was very disappointed to find that images from my D2X take a long time to show up on my screen for both Win XP and Macintel.  For the 21Mp CRW2 file, it takes only 2 secs to display on C1 Pro 4.6.2 screen.  With Nikon, it takes about 14 secs just to show up in the viewer of Camera Control.

Is this the expereicne of other users here who have shot both brands?  I really want to be able to shoot tethered with Nikon also and especially when I'm planning to buy a D3X in the near future.  Please share your experience and if you know of any way to improve on this, kindly let me know.  Thanks.

I have not shot thethered, but C1 Pro is said to be OK fast. You might want to try the trial version.

Regards,
Bernard

[crabby]

Henry-I've got bad news and I've got bad news.  Camera Contrlol Pro 2 only works fast on relatively current machines.  We only run CCP 2.4 on Macs so I can't say much about the PeeCee side except when I was asking these questions everyone said they were fine with it on windows.  From what I gathered though, these were not pros shooting tethered everyday they were mostly shooting birds at their bird feeder and their dog in the living room.   I run a MBP dual 2.0 w/4 gigs of ram as my slowest machine and it takes less then two seconds to load an image.  Our older PowerBooks with 1.5 single processor loaded with ram took in the 15 second range to load an image.

So the little secret that nikon doesn't let on is that you have to be fairly current with your hardware to run their software.  But you can't go too current because CCP2 does not work on Apple's latest operating system 10.5.6.  So if you bought a mac in the last 5 months you are equally screwed.  Macs with 110.5.5 or lower work fine.  Takes less then 2 seconds to load.  Nikon doesn't have any idea when (I say if) they will have a fix for 10.5.6.  

Also Nikon just updated CCP yesterday to CCP2.5.0.  I was very excited but alas they did not fix anything they just added support for the D5000.  So now there's another camera that wont run on OSX 10.5.6.
Actually Henry, you might not be in that bad a shape because the biggest issue with CCP2 and OS X 10.5.6 is when using LiveView which the D2x doesn't have.  So by all means rush out there and buy a new computer to get your camera/software combo working the way it should (nikon should put this info in their requirements).  I just wouldn't rush out there to buy another nikon camera yet.