It’s been a great week to be a photographer, with Canon and Nikon upping the ante across their ranges of products. Apart from the big sensors, “live view” enhancements, and other good stuff in the 1Ds Mk III, D3, and other new cameras, my eye gravitated to some wireless network-oriented features Nikon has announced. From DP Review:
Now, with the new Nikon Wireless Transmitter WT-43, the era of the multi camera network has arrived. Not only can one transmit (‘push’) images to servers and remotely control the camera from afar, the WT-4 also enables remote browsing of the camera’s image thumbnails as well.
In a wireless environment, networks of up to 5 D3 and D300 cameras can be established. At a sports event, for example, photo editors could browse all thumbnails on each camera simultaneously, selecting (‘pulling’) the images they need, while the photographers continue shooting.
Hmm–that sounds pretty darn cool. Does this spell an end to young guys sprinting down sidelines with sacks of CF cards, delivering them to some dude shielding his laptop in a sleeping bag? Time will tell. As with so much technology, of course, I’m sure it’ll keep compressing our perception of “fast enough.” [Update: Rob Galbraith has more details and a photo of the transmitter.]
Wanted to post but could not find a Contact us link.
I think the issue of splitting Photoshop CS3 into two versions is beginning to now hit home. People are regretting not having certain features and that the choice had to be made as to which version. This is going to be a big concern I think down the line.
I have suggested over at NAPP that Adobe (and you can make some money on this!) need to consider offering plug-ins for CS non-extended users to update their versions to allow some “Extended” capabilities/functionalities. For example, how about offering to update the time-line (instead of tweening) functions for animation?
I got an animation to work in non-extended based on a CS3 extended only Tutorial (Corey Barker’s latest video tutorial at NAPP). I do not know how it worked in my version but it did. However, it only worked once and it will not work for others. Since I posted about this at the NAPP Forum site others have started to comment about how they wish they had some other functionalities.
I think Adobe might have done an injustice by forcing the choice of versions on an unwitting and formerly loyal public. If you are going this route it needs to be a full “Build your own version” with all desired capabilities built in and not an alternative forced choice approach.
[There are many interesting questions here, and we did quite a bit of research before arriving at the two-flavor strategy for Photoshop/Photoshop Extended. We don’t want to compromise Photoshop’s position as the industry-standard imaging tool by Balkanizing it into innumerable little configurations. Neither did customers, we learned. That approach would introduce configuration and delay sales as people tried to figure out what to buy. (We get complaints now about there being too many Suite configurations, and too few.
Having said this, we don’t want to keep presenting a one-size-(or two sizes)-fit(s)-all user experience. We want Photoshop to be “everything you want, nothing you don’t,” where the irrelevant parts (to you) are hidden while the most useful stuff is brought forward. I think we can accomplish that quite well on the two-configuration codebase we now offer. –J.]
Hi John,
If you like the idea of remote editing, you might be interested in Phojo/IRES. Instead of buying a WT-4 you simply plug your G900 Windows Mobile Phone or UMPC into the camera, allowing your editor to browse and edit your photos in real time, even over a HSDPA or BGAN connection, from anywhere in the world. Swiss Image used it at the World Economic Forum to get their cropped and captioned images online in under 2 minutes from being taken.
http://idruna.com/remoteediting.html
[Cool–thanks for the heads-up, Paul. –J.]