dslrdashboard.info

Hi

I want to use an android as an external monitor for my d7100 for stills. I'm hoping that the DSLDashboard can facilitate..

I don't want the android download/view process to impede my ability to take shots as fast as I want from the camera body, but I'm finding this not to be the case yet.

I switched my camera to do small jpeg+raw, as I saw advised here. I also made the jpeg a lesser quality to decrease download time.

But still, the running DSLR Dashboard is quite slow. Observations:
1) There's a lag between camera shutter button press and any reaction in the software. I will upgrade my SD card to be even faster as I noticed this lag got worse on slow cards. Any other ideas?
2) download time is high -- I will upgrade from wifi to USB to see how much this helps
3) jpeg display time -- jpeg display time seems quite slow in the program, slower than other programs. Can anything be done?
4) when I'm using the software, my ability to continuously shoot is greatly reduced. Upon enough activity, the shutter button stops responding. Could the program be updated or configured to allow greater parallism in the download/display/shoot process? Anything to prevent the shutter button from not responding would help.
5) can I prevent the android device from saving the images it downloads? I don't need them, and if I get this all working I'll ideally have hours of hands free operation of the android monitor, where I may take 800+ photos per session.

Any other ideas?

Thank you!
-Eric

The camera is working a bit different when in remote capture mode.
You can't start another capture until the previous is finished.
Also the camera does not work in parallel mode but rather in serial mode, so it is executing the remote commands in the order it received it.
Image download over wireless is always slower then over USB cable.
Just tested with D7100+WU-1a adapter to capture (RAW+JPEG Basic/small) and the image download was under 1 second, not sure how to make this faster.

Thanks for the response!

I imagine the Nikon sdk has limitations, but is there any reason the next download can't start as soon as the previous finishes? It seems the jpg decompress could be done in parallel with the next download. The jpg decompress is quite slow to finish, on my android it takes >2s. On a laptop it shows a black and white version almost instantly but then pauses for over a second to complete and redraw. Ooh, I just noticed that turning off the histogram helps the jpg load time a bit on my laptop, haven't yet tried it on android. It seems histogram could be lazy loaded as well.

What about question 5? I need to be completely hands off on the android during the shoot as I'll be shooting underwater.

Thank you!

If you see the 'black and white' image that means the image is already downloaded and displayed, it is only a BW filter that is done over the image.
Histogram calculation will slow down, bigger image slower display, but again I have no problem with JPG basic/small images.
As I wrote already the camera will not work in parallel mode, so you can't download and capture.
In order to display the image it needs to be downloaded and saved, you can delete the images from the image gallery or you can disable the 'image review' option and then no image is downloaded.