So I had the opportunity to test an Ipad with a Nikon D300 this morning!
I was always struggling with the fact that in fashion photography and strobist meetings it’s not always that obvious to evaluate the shot quality or pre-show pictures to other people. Yesterday a colleague of mine walked in with an Apple Ipad and showed me some nice features : picture viewing was só smooth! I had to ask to test this.
The point was to test the tethered setup and a preview functionality.
We first hooked up the USB cable from the camera to the camera connection kit (apple) but we encountered a strange phenomenon. The camera was detected but picture previews where not shown… we google’d some of the fora out there and found someone had to change usb cable… so we did. I was using a 5m cable, that I usually have to shoot tethered with my laptop and lightroom 3. Apparently this seems to pose a problem for the Ipad, we switched to a 1.5m usb cable and hazaa! raw pictures were recognized instantly, imported and previews (that are embedded in the NEF) were of decent quality to scroll trough. Also the selection of import, deletion of pictures on CF (in the camera) worked awesomely. A little note on the side: deleting all pictures on the CF is a bit too easy and really fast! so be careful with that!
The Ipad doesn’t support the NEF format, logic in my opinion, seen there is no real CPU power to support this smoothly. As mentioned it uses the embedded Jpeg, so zooming on a picture was not of that great quality.
So now the only question is, what the best workflow is? Using the Ipad as a storage facility to import them on a PC (or mac for that matter) is not the right way in my opinion. The Ipad is too expensive and not made for this application. There have to be better methods out there.
I believe the Ipad to be a real nice thing to preview pictures with but in the end, if that’s the only thing you can do with it as a photographer, maybe other solutions are more adequate… I will take a look at some other possibilities and talk about it some more.
For now i’ll stick to the 3″ I have on my D300 
