RAW does not work well.

Yesterday I commented on how long it takes to email a photo using Photos on the iPad if the original you imported using the Camera Connection Kit was in RAW format. Bottom line is that it takes so long (>4 minutes) that it’s a waste of time. (At this point Apple fanboys, blinded by Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field, can pour themselves a tall glass of STFU and exit stage left).

Today, I took a RAW snap, uploaded it from the G1’s SDHC card to the iPad using the Camera Connection Kit’s SDHC card reader, then emailed it from the iPad to a poor unenlightened individual who has the misfortune of using Windows 7 and MSFT Exchange at work.

The reply came back: “I cannot open the file”. Now being an empirical type (meaning I don’t write “it works” until I have tried it, unlike some of the jerks posting comments here), I also copied myself on the email to Mail app in Snow Leopard. I could see the JPG preview attached to the RAW file fine, and also noted that the RW2 RAW file, some 12mB in size, was attached to the email. However, all the Windows 7-using addressee could see was an RW2 icon which he could not open, not having the necessary RAW converter on his PC. Further, the large file size of the JPG to which the RAW file was attached may well have been blocked by his employer’s email system. So he saw nothing save an RW2 icon which he could not open. Like so:

I fished around in Photos on the iPad and also in iPad’s Settings->Photos but could not find an option to send only the JPG file as an email attachment. So, if you want your iPad-emailed photos to be visible to all email addressees, it seems that the right thing to do now is to forget RAW and shoot in JPG. That way only a JPG will be sent, visible to one and all.

Further, unlike sending photos by email using iPhoto on a Mac – which gives you a choice of which size you wish to send – there is no such option at present in iPad’s Photos app, meaning that whatever resolution you shoot the JPG with will be the size emailed. As my native JPG in the G1 is set high, that makes for large JPGs – not very useful when all an email generally dictates is a photo with a long side no more than 640 pixels.

Not very useful.

I just received the iPad Camera Connection Kit from Apple:

It includes two adapters which plug into the base socket on the iPad – one for direct connection of a camera, the other to allow download to the iPad of images stored on an SDHC card.

I tried it with a direct connection to the Panasonic G1, noting the following:

• 20 RAW images took some 10 seconds to download to the Photos app on the iPad – not bad
• The JPG previews are 1336 x 2000 pixels (2.7mB), which is what you will see when you email yourself the photo, in addition to the underlying 10-12mB RAW file
• You cannot sync photos downloaded to the iPad to your desktop. Right now iTunes only allows sync from desktop to iPad, not the other way around
• The only way to get a photo to your desktop is to email it to yourself
• Try to email more than one RAW image at a time (approx.11mB per image) and the iPad chokes
• Sending a single image take 4 minutes which is as good as useless
• Preview on the iPad is fine but that’s as far as it goes as Photos has no processing capability yet
  
• Most disappointingly, you cannot use the iPad as a giant Live View preview screen for composing studio pictures, as the G1’s EVF is diabled the moment a camera cable is plugged in. Other Live View cameras may differ.

SDHC connector and camera connector – you supply the cable

Connecting the SDHC card reader and inserting an 8gB SDHC Transcend card saw the same 20 pictures loaded to the iPad in 7 seconds. Not bad at all.

If you are using a camera which uses CF cards, use a CF->SDHC card adapter in the camera as the Camera Connection Kit does not accept CF cards

So what’s needed here to make the iPad more than a cursory review device is the following:

• Software for the iPad with processing controls
• Two way cable sync between the iPad and a connected computer to allow speedy moving of files from the iPad to the desktop.
• Panny needs to update its software to allow piping of Live View images to an external device

However, long time readers of this column will know that Dr. P. is anything but a quitter. Check my earlier piece on iPhone Explorer, written when the only people with iPads were Steve Jobs’s kids and a few guys in Cupertino, CA sworn to secrecy on penalty of death, and you will see that you can look at your iPhone files by simply firing up iPhone Explorer on a Mac to which your iPhone is connected. Well, guess what? It works just fine with the iPad!

iPad files viewed on a desktop Mac using iPhone Explorer

In case you are wondering about the two XMP sidecar files shown above, those were generated by the iPad when I emailed the related RAW files to myself. I did not email the third, hence only two XMP files.

Now you can drag and drop the files onto your connected Mac and transfer is lightning fast. The three RW2 RAW files from the G1 came over in 3 seconds with the iPad connected using the standard USB cable. They open fine in Lightroom which sees them as RAW files:

RAW files from iPad downloaded to LR using iPhone Explorer

I had hoped that maybe you could just use LR’s “File->Import Photos from Device” menu option but unfortunately LR 2.6 does not see the iPad as a device. Given the awfully bad blood between Adobe and Apple at this time, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for LR to recognize the iPad any time soon. No matter, someone else will figure it out. Obviously, if iPhone Explorer can see the files, it’s not exactly nuclear physics to make a photo processing Mac application see them.

Well, it’s a start. At least you can move files quickly to the iPad by sidestepping email but there’s work to be done in Apple HQ.

Disclosure: No AAPL position.

Follow-up:

I have received several comments from readers who assure me I am doing something wrong and that I merely need to load iPhoto on my Mac to transfer photos from the iPad. Clearly, none of these readers have tried that. Talk is cheap. Expertise rare. It will be a cold day in hell before I publish drivel like “You are doing something wrong” with no suggestions as to what ‘right’ is. What possible value are you adding by wasting your time typing that?

However, I have found out what I was doing wrong, no thanks to these useless Comments. Where do you people come from?

Here’s the fix.

I was connecting the iPad to one of the USB outlets on my Dell monitor. These are low power outlets (0.25 watt if memory serves) and clearly do not generate sufficient power to force recognition of the iPad in iPhoto. I twigged this when it occurred to me that you can use these low power outlets for recharging the iPad , if slowly, only when the iPad is asleep. Otherwise, the iPad displays a ‘Not charging’ message. Aaah! More power is needed.

So I connected the iPad to a motherboard outlet on my Mac and, voila*, the iPad and its picture album popped up in iPhoto and download was speedy and easy.

Let me repeat. Comments which add value will be published. All others, like this jerk’s, go to spam status.

* Or ‘viola’ as those asinine commentators would put it.

Something fishy is going on.

One of the first complaints heard about the iPad was that it was failing to connect, or to maintain a connection, to wifi.

Apple acknowledged there is an issue, mainly blaming dual band routers:

My router is the older style single band Airport Extreme which I run at 802.11b/g shared mode at 2.4gHz. I cannot run it at 5gHz ‘n’ only as I then lose wifi on my 3G iPhone, which only works with ‘g’. The latest dual band AEX simultaneously broadcasts both ‘g’ at 2.4gHz and ‘n’ at 5gHz to work around this issue and provide the highest speed broadband to ‘n’ capable devices without disconnecting slower ‘g’ machines.

As I mentioned recently, seated at the same location as my desktop, where I consistently get speeds around 10-11 mb/s, the iPad delivered a very credible 4.3 mb/s and whatever that measurement means, the reality is that web surfing speed feels almost as fast as on my massive and immensely capable desktop. I have never had the iPad fail to establish a wifi connection whether at home or at any number of neighborhood locales, the latter consistently delivering far faster surfing speeds than on my iPhone. So I’m not complaining.

Still, curiosity being what it is, I have run Speetest on the iPad a few times in the past few days and the results are all over the place, as the following shows:

The oldest result above is the one featured in the link. The highest speeds seem to occur very late or very early, yet even that is not always the case if you scan the above table. Further, if I place the iPad within 5 feet of my router the speed drops to the 3,600 mb/s rate, whereas in my office, two walls and thirty feet away, it rises to anywhere from 4,000mb/s to 11,000+ mb/s. Meanwhile, the desktop machine fluctuates in a narrow range between 9,500 mb/s and 10,500 mb/s. The strangest data pair here are the readings on 4/14/10 at 20:39 and 20:40, respectively, where the download speed jumped from 6,732 mb/s to 9,676 mb/s in the space of one minute.

So clearly something funky is going on here. While I remain a happy camper, there is an issue, and I look forward to hearing more from Apple about what is going on here.

The stock one stinks.

The power cable which comes with the iPod could hardly be more chintzy. It has a hard to grasp connector at the iPod end and the little ears you press to disconnect it are …. missing. No more captive connectors from Apple, it seems.

To add insult to injury, the cable is a miserable 3 feet long. Hey, Apple, I understand profit margins as well as the next guy, but I also do not particularly enjoy a kick in the crotch after blowing $650 on one of your products.

Anyway, the answer is both simple and inexpensive:

It comes from Cables-to-Go via Amazon, is five feet long, uses far sturdier cable, has a properly designed captive connector which works and the other end can be plugged into your computer or into the iPad’s power transformer, which is the fastest way to recharge it. Finally, the ‘up’ side is ribbed so you don’t have to search for that microscopic logo Apple imprints on the poor stock design. It works as well with the iPhone as with the iPad. And at $9, what’s not to like?

Disclosure: AAPL long stock position has appreciated 27.5 32gB iPads since iPad Day, 4/3/2010, of which I have blown 2.0