We spent all of last week at photokina in Cologne. We’re very glad to be back in Wiesbaden though. As fun as it is to talk to all you visitors, and show off our great products, six days is a long time! Especially after several weeks of preparations.
Thank you all for coming by! We’ll definitely be back in 2 years!
We’re back from photokina2012 – a great show and a great success! As promised I headed over to the Nikon Booth, and tested our Unleashed Dx000 on the D600.
At first, my heart sunk: No GPS icon on the top LCD. Luckily, when I took photos, the GPS data was embedded in the EXIF data! I figured that Nikon might have simply not included a GPS icon at all on the top LCD. Looking through the manual (page 175 7) it is evident that this is not the case. – there definitely should be a GPS icon. Maybe I simply overlooked it, or the Model on display malfunctioned in some way. Sorry for this false information. Page 175 shows the INFO display, not the top LCD. Top LCD or “Control Panel” is shown on page 7, and definitely does NOT have a GPS icon.
The Unleashed will fit nicely on the D600, the only problem being that the rubberflap is in the way. While it is possible to use the Unleashed like that, the pressure from the flap will, over time, cause the Plug on the Unleashed to break off the PCB inside, which eventually result in malfunction. There are two nice solutions for this:
I misread the manual: Page 175 shows the INFO screen, not the TOP LCD. On page 7 one can see that the top LCD really does not have a GPS icon – in other words, the D600 is fully compatible with the Unleashed Dx000, no “odd behaviour”, no doubt about it.
More and more software is coming out with support for geotagged photos. Finally Adobe has caught on, and has released Lightroom 4, along with pretty decent geotagging features.
“Map” is now one of the main views available in Lightroom, in which you will see a big map, with markers in all the spots on the map in which you took photos. If you zoom out, markers too close together are merged. Instead of an empty marker representing a single photo, a number is displayed on that marker, indicating the number of photos taken in that area. You can also choose to load GPS tracklog files, and have Lightroom 4 display these on the map. These tracks can even be used to indirectly geotag photos that are not yet geotagged, by matching the timestamps.
Optionally, you can blend in extra panels. The left panel contains three subviews:
The right panel is your usual Metadata panel, in which you can see EXIF, IPTC and other Metadata, including the EXIF Fields with the GPS coordinates, along with button that will center the map to those coordinates. You can even choose to only display Location Metadata.
Along the bottom you have your film-strip panel. The photos in here all have badges in the bottom right corner, indicating whether or not they are geotagged. if you click on one of the markers in the map view, all the photos in that location are centered and highlighted in the film-strip view, so you can quickly see which photos were taken there. Instead of clicking on a single marker in the map, you can also apply one of three Location filters (along the top of the map view):
I have not taken the time to dive any deeper into Lightroom 4 (I use Apples Aperture – which has supported geotagging for quite a while longer), who knows what other gems I might have missed – so feel free to add your own finds in the comments!
That’s right, we did it again. Our new, wireless direct barcode scanning solution for Nikon DSLRs, the Unleashed – Barcode Edition, won the DIMA 2010 Innovative Digital Product award, which was presented to us at the Sneak Peek Press event of PMA2010.
The Unleashed – Barcode Edition is a by-product of our main product – the Unleashed. However, instead of connecting to a Bluetooth GPS, it connects to a Bluetooth barcode scanner. The photographer scans in a barcode, which is embedded in the EXIF data of all of the following photos, until the next barcode is scanned.
Until now, Direct barcode scanning was only possible with the Fuji S5, which has been discontinued, and no successor was announced. The Unleashed – Barcode Edition enables direct barcode scanning with all high-end Nikon DSLRs – from the D200 and up. On top of that, the setup is entirely wireless.
