iPad Camera Connection Kit

iPad

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.

  • All the other limitations, above, apply – not good
  • 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.

    • No more dead forests

    iPad, Photographs

    Magazines on the iPad.

    Much as I enjoy my monthly fix of fashion and gossip, not to mention some of the best photography on planet earth, which arrives in the mail in the guise of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, I always think when I recycle these what a stunning waste of resources they represent. Forests and nasty chemicals to make, fuel to deliver, fuel to recycle, and so on. Now while I’m not some nutty global warming crazy, it just seems wrong that we should be destroying the world’s resources in search of the latest in clothing and fashions.

    Zinio to the rescue! They have just released an iPad app, and while it’s a work in progress it looks very promising. Some magazines don’t get it yet – meaning that links to articles, advertisers, related web sources, etc. should be clickable (Duh!) but it’s a start. You pay, download the magazine and can take it with you to read at any location with the caveat that any links that are present dictate the need for a wifi connection if they are to work.

    National Geographic doesn’t get links, yet, (I sometimes wonder if they get anything judging by their poorly engineered archive DVDs) and the issue takes a minute to load, but that’s not long to wait for some of the world’s greatest photography. I’m reproducing what follows at full iPad screen size so you can get a sense of the quality:

    National Geographic downloads ….

    Here’s a typical photo display:

    A photo in full screen display:

    And another – an absolute show stopper from Gerd Ludwig:

    Here’s the subscription screen for Harper’s with a lovely Demi Moore on the cover:

    I forget what I pay for the print subscription but suspect it’s more than the $8 asked for the iPad one.

    Macworld most certainly does get clickable links, and they have a very nice implementation, ads and all. No issue with the latter as they add value to any user interested in what’s out there.

    I learned of the availability of Macworld on the iPad by accident and shame on the publishers for doing such a poor job of advertising it. It’s excellent and as my print sub just expired, I’ll be renewing for the electronic version which is far easier to read than their free web site in Safari.

    There are a few British magazines and many Chinese (!) ones available. The British ones are simply clueless on pricing – an annual subscription typically being twelve times the cost of one issue. Double Duh!

    Otherwise, what’s not to like?

    Disclosure: Long AAPL common, now appreciated 68.7 32gB iPads at the time of writing. You do the math. Short AAPL covered call options at the time of writing.

    Just walking the pup

    Photographs

    Sometimes you get lucky.

    Though I’m no great fan of the “always carry a camera” exhortation, preferring to argue that you seek out good pictures and they rarely just happen, I was walking the dog yesterday and spotted these five in the space of 2 minutes and twenty yards. All I had was the iPhone 3G but it seems to have done OK in the circumstances.

    Awning.

    AT&T

    GTO

    Dodge

    Corrosion

    Always carry …. an iPhone!

    A note on iPhone photo files sizes: If you email a photo taken on the iPhone the size is 640 x 480, or 0.3 mp. By contrast, if you download it to Lightroom or iPhoto by connecting the iPhone to your desktop or laptop, the full size of 1600 x 1200, or 1.9 mp is downloaded, which is still not great but offers far better definition.

    Life with Mahler

    Movies, Photographs

    Life without him is not living.

    How can anyone live without Mahler? Standing at the cusp between the classical romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Schubert and the atonality of Stravinsky and Berg, he changed music as we know it. Whether through his beautiful songs or his massive symphonies, one’s understanding and appreciation of nature is raised an order of magnitude through listening to his works.

    Absent a few documentaries, the only dramatic movie of Mahler’s life is the one made in 1974 by Ken Russell, much of it filmed in the Lake District of England, as the production budget was tiny and the crew could scare afford to decamp to the Tyrol for the right scenery. Proving again that money and results are frequently poorly correlated in movie making, Russell does a masterful job, with his usual obsessions and eccentricities thrown in.

    In addition to dramatic intensity, the movie has some exceptional photography, a few frames of which I excerpt below. My original was a VHS copy which was pretty bad, though it was in widescreen. Now I have tracked down an ex-rental DVD which is a little better, though unfortunately in 4:3 format. One day someone will remaster this long forgotten out-of-print work and put it on BluRay with proper formatting. Meanwhile, the second rate DVD is all I have, so excuse the poor quality of what follows.

    Mahler is acted by Robert Powell, every bit as special here as in Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. He gives it his all, never overacting.

    The movie opens with some extraordinary imagery. After we see his lakeside hut explode in flames the director cuts to Mahler’s wife, Alma, trying to escape from a cocoon – the allegory being how his genius stifled her far from trivial musical talents.

    Alma Mahler tries to escape from the cocoon.

    The narrative takes place on a train where Alma tries to decide, over the course of the journey, whether to leave Mahler for a dashing soldier. Needless to add, Russell cannot resist a funny dig at Visconti’s Death in Venice, with this scene glimpsed on the train platform:

    Mahler as von Aschenbach.

    Another cut to a lakeside scene recalls nothing so much as Thomas Eakins’s famous picture:

    A recreation of Eakins’s The Swimming Hole

    The Swimming Hole by Thomas Eakins.

    As the train wends its way through the Austrian countryside there is an unforgettable image of Mahler as music plays in his head.

    Robert Powell IS Mahler.

    But if I have one favorite moment from this orgy of imagery served up by Russell, it is the scene where Mahler threatens to dunk Alma in the lake from the same little hut which explodes in flames at the start of the movie. Set to the concluding bars of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, you have to be clinically dead if the hairs on your back do not rise at this lush combination of sound and picture:

    The lovely Georgina Hale is Alma Mahler.

    A few years back I loaded up the CD player in my car with all of Mahler’s symphonies and drove up the coast highway of California from San Diego to the Oregon border, then inland across Death Valley listening to nothing else. If you want to appreciate what music tells you about nature, I recommend a like course of action.

    It’s been said that the Austrians’ greatest genius was to convince the world that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian. There is no need for such posturing here, for Mahler was quite simply the greatest musical creation of a nation which gave us anti-semitism, an anti-semitism which he took on and conquered in his all too brief life. The movie is highly recommended. I confess that parts of the Second Symphony are dancing in my brain as I type ….

    Update may 24, 2023:

    Well, it’s finally here. I just watched a Japanese remastering of Mahler on the big screen. No more scratchy VHS definition. No more castrated 4:3 format. In glorious 16:9 widescreen BluRay quality. Thank you, Japan, and I’m still wiping the tears from my face. A glorious piece of movie making.

    iPad wifi speeds

    iPad

    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.