Nikon has officially announced its new professional DSLR, the Nikon D4. A competitor to the Canon 1Dx (which presumably will hit the market about a month later than the Nikon D4), the biggest change here if compared to Nikon’s old D3 line of cameras are its new video capabilities. However, there are quite a number of new and improved features to drool about:

• Nikon FX-format CMOS sensor with 16.2 effective megapixels
• 91K-pixel RGB sensor for metering, white balance, flash exposure, face detection and active d-lighting
• ISO Range 100-12,800 (50 – 204,800 with boost)
• Multi-area mode Full HD D-Movie 1080p(24/25/30 fps), 720p (up to 60 fps)
• Improved high-speed image-processing engine EXPEED 3
• 51-point AF system with better performance in low-light situations and with smaller apertures (f8)
• Dual card slots for CF card compatible with UDMA 7 and the new XQD memory card (just announced by Sony).
• High-speed continuous shooting at approx. 11 fps in FX format without AE/AF and approx. 10 fps with AE/AF
• Glass pentaprism viewfinder with approx. 100% frame coverage (FX format) and approx. 0.7x magnification
• Approx. 921k-dot, wide-viewing angle, 8-cm (3.2-in.) LCD monitor with reinforced glass
• "Sub-selector" for horizontal shooting and "Multi selector for vertical shooting" joysticks/buttons
• Button illumination for better handling in low-light situations
• Virtual horizon that detects both "pitching" and "rolling" directions.
• New shutter unit tested for 400,000 cycles; shutter speed up to 1/8,000 s and flash synchronization up to 1/250 s
• Build-in Ethernet port allow to hook up to your network
• New optional Wireless Transmitter with a/b/g/n Wi-Fi support
• HTTP mode to remotely control the camera with any Internet enabled device (iPhone/iPad optimized)

Joe McNally has hands-on experience already, visit his blog for more!

The announced price is about U.S. $6000. Now, let's wait what the still unannounced Nikon D800 is going to offer…

Tags: Nikon, D4

Note: This is one part of a multipart installment about my personal experiences with the iPad. If you are interested and haven’t read the previous parts, start here:

• What is iPad? — Introduction

The iPad is for Photographers…

Using the iPad for photography is a mixed bag. Let me start with the positive aspects. If you use the iPad you start to see where digital imaging is heading eventually. It just feels natural to “touch” your photographs and manipulate them by direct interaction with the image itself, not having to use some device “in the middle” such as a mouse or a pen tablet. I can imagine that professional solutions such as the Wacom Cintiq pen displays may offer an experience similar or even superior in respect to direct interaction with the image, but those solutions are expensive and require a more complex setup (inherent to any “multiple devices” solution). And, though I haven’t used such a pen display myself, I have a hard time to believe that, e.g., running Photoshop on a classical desktop computer with such a pen display feels nearly as fast as the interaction with the iPads user interface.

The iPad allows to import JPEG as well as RAW images from your camera or SD cards using the Camera Connection Kit. The workflow is a no brainer, just connect everything and turn on your camera. Ether all photographs or a selection will be imported, with reasonable speed. iPad offers you to automatically skip images you may have imported before. The iPad’s iOS comes with a variant of the Mac OS X RAW converter creating JPEG previews, and you can browse your images as natural as it gets, with swiping gestures for switching to the next image or pinching gestures for zooming in or out. The experience of these interactions are unrivaled by any user interface I have experienced. Performance is incredibly fast, there are no delays or “hiccups”.

Apple has brilliantly designed a system that feels much faster than more powerful hardware. Many aspects of the systems design come together in the creation of this perceived performance, and it is not all UI design. One design decision obviously was to remove virtual memory management from the Mac OS X core to create iOS. That means, any application running gets to use only the amount of RAM that remains after iOS itself gets its share. With only 256 MB of RAM, that is not too much.

Though this clearly contributes to the creation of the incredible user experience, it is a trade-off that currently limits the iPads use for digital imaging. There are many Apps available that provide a rich environment for your image processing needs. However, any App can only keep a certain image size in memory. For most Apps, that’s an image size of roughly 4 megapixels. Larger images will be scaled down automatically, but don’t start to sweat — you will always work on a copy of the original file. In fact, Apps cannot directly access the original files of the images imported, they get access only through an API that makes available the image data and not the actual image file.

Though this “sandbox” approach greatly increases security (something that cannot be underestimated for a system that handles your precious photographs), it further restricts possible use cases. Any photographers workflow that involves on-set retouching of images and/or submission of the high quality, full size images via the internet to clients or stock photography agencies are currently left out in the rain. What works, though, is quick retouching and upload of web-ready images to Facebook, flickr, etc., depending on the image processing App you use. My personal recommendation would be Photogene, but there are many more good ones. Once you sync your iPad with your desktop computer, iPhoto or Aperture will import the originals as if you had connected your camera or a card reader.

That said, recently a very interesting article has been published by Rob Galbraith on his blog, that explains how to overcome many of the restrictions of Apple’s Photo app “vault” approach. Rob Galbraith is a digital pro photographer that came to my attention in 2007, while a heated public discussion about the autofocus system of Canon’s flagship DSLR EOS-1D Mark III was going on. Essentially, he started the whole discussion with an article he wrote…

In his recent article, he discusses his wireless workflow during photo shoots, which involves the iPad as an essential component. Running the app ShutterSnitch, he uses the iPad as wirelessly connected FTP server collecting — and at the same time presenting — the photos taken right during his photo sessions. Key strengths of the iPad he points out are, among others, its display quality that “…offers a degree of colour accuracy that isn't far off the best laptop screens we've tested…”, and the iPad’s battery that “…just won't quit…”.

There’s much more to his elaborate setup, I recommend to work through his eight (!) pages going deep into the details of wireless transmitters, routers, and the correct configuration of the whole setup. The bottom line of his approach is not to go directly into Apple’s Photo app through the camera connector, but to intercept the photo stream with a 3rd part app by using an alternative transmission method.

Conclusion: For me, the iPad is the perfect vault to keep an immutable copy of my photographs while traveling. The originals are kept safe, and in addition you have the possibility to review your days work and send out emails or publish on the web for quick communication. For more demanding usage scenarios, there are ways how to meet those requirements as well.

Next installment coming soon: The iPad is for Readers…

Tags: iPad, Apple, RAW

The public discussion about the iPad has been marred by hype, hyperbole, hate and hope — opinions ranging from ‘epic fail’ to ‘savior of the publishing industry’ could be found next to each other even in the same print or web publication. For the informed reader however, more often than not it became apparent that the respective authors had never “touched” an iPad to begin with. Lately, the discussion about iPad became more tamed — public vigilance concerning Apple first found its new target in Antennagate and nowadays seems to subside further with people expecting Apple to crumble under the advent of a flurry of iPad knock-offs powered by Android (though Google itself thinks using the current version of Android for tablets is a bit premature).

The one thing no one can deny any more: The iPad is a runaway success. Why is that?

Three months have passed since my dear wife got me an iPad. Enough time for the iPad to find its niche within my daily routine. Novelty has worn off but still I find myself using the iPad on a daily basis in areas where once my laptop has been indispensable. Reflecting on my usage patterns, I would like to try for myself to solve that enigma puzzling people since the beginning of 2010: What is iPad?

Surprising to me, I don’t use my MacBook Pro that often any more. At home, that is — at work, I still need that truck. With my personal computing requirements, however, I find only few tasks that remain predestined for running them on my laptop.

Those would be more or less the following: my digital RAW image processing workflow, re-encoding video, and writing this blog… The critical prerequisite for the first two tasks is just processing power: fast CPUs crunching numbers, and large amounts of RAM. However, writing this blog only depends on the web design software I had chosen initially, and that does not run on iPad yet. Wouldn’t that be nice, though? RapidWeaver is written using Cocoa, after all… There have been good examples of complex Mac OS X software that quickly found its way on to the iPad.

For now leaving behind the stuff iPad can’t help with yet, I would like to take a closer look at typical use cases in everyday personal computing. Surfing the web, reading, occasional gaming, writing emails and much more of the tasks I used to do on my laptop computer I now do solely with the iPad. Sometimes it took some re-thinking the ways I used to do stuff, but with a bit of flexibility you may find the benefits of iPad clearly outweigh “old school” computing.

When I started to summarize my experiences with the iPad, I thought that I might be able to write a short, comprehensive overview and be done with it. Turns out there is much to tell, even though I promised myself to keep it short. So, I decided to publish a number of short installments, each focussing on a particular usage scenario. The first one will focus on using the iPad as a tool for digital photography and will be published right after this blog entry:

• What is iPad? — The iPad is for Photographers…

Tags: iPad, MacBook, RapidWeaver, Desktop

In June 2009, Qualcomm and Nvidia introduced a new category of laptop computers not based on Intel CPUs, but running on ARM-derived chip designs — the same hardware used with modern Smartphones. Thus, those Netbook-style devices were aptly named “Smartbooks”…

Smartbooks were supposed to solve the main issue of any ultra-mobile computer, including Netbooks: Short battery life caused by Intel’s relatively power hungry CPUs (to be fair, looking at general efficiency Intel’s current lineup is much better today than it was during the days when Intel got stuck with the NetBurst architecture). Based on the ARM-design, Smartbooks using e.g. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPU were supposed to fulfill on a promise made by virtually any vendor in this industry: Availability of an always-on, Internet-connected mobile device with all-day battery life, which doesn’t weigh much and is small enough to be carried around while still being more productive than a typical Smartphone.

Sound familiar? That definition, sure — but anyone still waiting for the first Smartbook to hit the market? (I think, HP has released one officially — have yet to see it in any store or on the streets, though). Even before that market was shaped, one vendor single-handedly killed it. Today, you can buy Internet-connected, small and light devices that last all day and provide reasonably good productivity (if you don’t want to tinker with the innards of your system). That would be the iPad.

The introduction of the iPad got the whole crowd of computer vendors hurrying to catch-up with Apple. Head over heels, Smartbook designs were canned, or refitted into a tablet form-factor. At least, that’s the impression one gets. And the CEO of the guys having introduced the term “Smartbook” in the first place admits as much.

But, Google’s Chrome OS was supposed to power Smartbooks — it is still due this year. Maybe we will see a revival of this comatose device category. More likely, though, Chrome OS will power tablets. But, what happens then to the soon-to-be-released Android-based bunch of tablets? If you bought one of those, will you be happy once Chrome OS has replaced those “temporary” devices?

Tags: iPad, Apple, Google, Smartphone, Smartbook, Netbook, ARM, Intel

Apple iOS 4.1 is now available, you can download it from iTunes right away.

I just installed it on my iPhone 3G, and on a quick first assessment I can confirm that the performance of the user interface increased noticeably. Though I did not experience the severe slowdowns some blog writers reported after upgrading their iPhone 3G’s to iOS 4.0, my 3G does feel “snappier” after todays update nonetheless…

Tags: iPhone, iOS, Apple, iTunes, Update

I still remember a review of both the Newton MessagePad from Apple and the Palm Pilot in a then popular german TV show, WDR Computerclub. Technologically, the Newton won — but their recommendation in the end was the Palm Pilot. It was affordable and almost as good as the Newton. But, I wanted a Newton. That was 1997, if I remember correctly… Steve Jobs axed the Newton a year later, and in the year 2000 I got my first Palm-like device, the Handspring Visor Deluxe. Actually, I owned two — my first Visor got stolen, and the second died because its batteries leaked. Until Apple released the iPhone, I stopped using PDAs and their descendants, the smartphones. Those “merged” devices, combining a stylus-driven PDA with a phone, always seemed clumsy to me. The iPhone was a revelation, at last.

Now the iPad is here. I pre-ordered mine on Monday, a gift from my wife. Apple sold its first shipment pretty fast here in Germany, those who pre-ordered yesterday will have to wait for another week until their iPad will ship.

Looking at the iPad, a lot reminds of the Newton. Apple sees that as well, just compare the old Newton ad below with the new iPad ad from Apple (thanks to Arnold Kim for discovering the resemblance of both ads).

One thing neither Newton, Palm Pilot, nor the iPhone, was particularly good at was to provide an interactive canvas for photo editing. Though the iPhone has its fair share of image editing apps, its screen size just isn’t sufficient. The iPad changes this. At least, the iPad comes with Apples raw converter infrastructure known from the Mac. How this translates into something a photographer can use remains to be seen… Apple may never release an Aperture “touch” version (who knows?), but there are others that have experience in leveraging Apples raw converter. The iPad hardware may not be powerful enough yet, but eventually this will change with future versions.

Tags: Apple, iPad, Newton, iPhone, Palm, Handspring, Aperture

Visiting Siena was the first real opportunity for me to put my new geotagger to the test. In the past, I have used my iPhone’s GPS using the Trails App to record my location during day trips. For the subsequent photo tagging, I was initially using HoudahGeo, then later I switched to the nicely integrated Aperture plugin Maperture Pro. This was with Aperture 2, with Aperture 3 no additional software is needed any more... However, I got tired of the hassle of importing and synchronizing tracks, so I decided to get a GPS receiver for the hot shoe of my camera.

Though the Nikon GP-1 unit looked quite promising at first, I decided to go for the Solmeta Geotagger N2 — even though I had to import the unit from China. Almost half the price of the Nikon product (considering the exchange rate at that time, not including import duty), the Geotagger N2 has the additional benefit of an electronic compass recording the heading of the camera. The Nikon D300 supports GPS heading data and the Solmeta GPS unit comes with all the right cables for the D300. In addition, the Geotagger N2 has a build-in rechargeable battery, delaying depletion of the cameras battery-pack quite a bit. If you want to use a flash, you can clip the geotagger to your camera strap. Then, of course, the heading will be off…



The Geotagger N2 is a rather plain plastic box, as you can see in the photo above. In the hot shoe, it is a very tight fit. But, because it’s all plastic, I am confident that gets less and less of a problem over time… The unit has a socket for a cable remote and Solmeta adds a reasonably functional one. The 10-pin socket of the Nikon D300 itself is occupied by the Geotagger N2 wiring.

Using the geotagger is simple. Turn it on — or put it on “auto” and turn your camera on — and wait for a more or less short time for the unit to acquire its position. The chip used for the Geotagger N3 is a SiRF Star III, and the time it needs to get a lock is comparable to other systems using this chip. It takes longer, if you haven’t used the unit for a while or if you have traveled a great distance with the geotagger turned off. Personally, once I use the tagger I actually leave it on the whole time I carry the camera. I don’t use its “auto” position. With the build-in rechargeable battery of the Geotagger N2, a fully charged Nikon EN EL3e and an Eneloop-loaded MB-D10 battery grip you keep on shooting for at least one, two days or more…

The accuracy of the tagger seems OK. I have done a few tests comparing the location of the geotagger with the one reported by my iPhone. Those two match quite well. In addition, the location reported on the same geographical spot at different times and different weather conditions are pretty close and match my actual location pretty good. Unfortunately, I have not yet tested the recorded heading with any supporting software - Aperture 3 does not visualize heading (that would be a feature request for Apple...), and I had not time yet to test any other software.



Overall, I am quite happy with the Solmeta Geotagger N2. Its price is reasonable and the feature/function set is superior if you compare it with the Nikon GP-1. There are few negative points: its design is plain and the plastic material feels a bit cheap. Though where it matters most, actually recording an accurate geographical location, this gadget performs admirably.

Tags: Geotagging, Nikon, D300, Aperture, Siena, Solmeta, Geotagger N2