You pick up your iPhone, switch on your DSLR, and they start talking to each other. The camera beams its point-of-view wirelessly back to the phone, you tap the screen and the camera focuses. Tap the on-screen “Fire” button and the picture is taken, appearing seconds later on the iPhone’s screen. You tap and zoom in to check focus.
This futuristic scenario tok place today in my office, with one important addition: a computer. The software is called DSLR Remote, by Onone software, and it allows you to control your DSLR camera over a wireless network using an iPhone or iPod Touch. It also requires a computer connected directly to the camera’s USB port.
I have been playing with the application for the last day and it is a lot of fun, and in some situations it could be a very useful tool. But it is far from ready in a proper professional environment where bulletproof software is required.
First, you hook up the camera to a computer. On that computer you need the to install some companion software (Mac or PC) called DSLR Camera Remote Server, which is what does the actual controlling of the camera. Here, too, you can specify where images are saved and have a copy made to be sent off to Adobe Lightroom for an (almost) instant preview.
Once this is running (after the first use you can forget about it), you fire up the iPhone app and see the simple main screen, with access to various settings. From here you can control picture format (anything the camera can do, pretty much, including RAW plus various qualities of jpg), white balance and, depending on which mode the camera is in, shutter speed and aperture. There are also easy exposure compensation and ISO settings.
From here you can head to settings, for more tweaking and to switch on Live View. This gives you a live video feed from the camera, and when you tap the image, the camera will focus. You can’t choose the focus point like you can with the iPhone’s built-in camera: what the camera focuses on depends on in-camera settings.
So far, this is all quite responsive. I tried it out on my MSI Wind netbook, which runs OS X, and it worked, although oddly the iPhone app was very jittery, with disappearing pictures and buttons. Using it with a real MacBook worked fine, however. I have no idea why this should be.
When you finally take a snap, it appears a few seconds later on your iPhone’s screen, and a few more seconds after that it shows up in Lightroom (if you are using this. You don’t have to). Double-tapping the image zooms to that point, but it’s neither very responsive nor accurate. And once you are zoomed in you can’t drag around the image with a finger, an odd omission for the iPhone. In fact, the entire viewing part of the experience is sluggish. I’m using a second-generation iPod Touch, so those with a faster iPhone 3GS might fare better.
Still, the app is only at v1.1 and is adding features. If you are shooting indoors, and especially if you are shooting sel-portraits, the ability to shoot tethered with a remote control and a live feed to check framing is very nice, and $20 is probably a fair price. The $2 lite version pretty much only lets your trigger the shutter from afar, and given that you’ll still need to lug a computer to do this, buying a dedicated remote may be more practical, if more expensive.
As fun and sometimes useful toy, we recommend it. For pro-use, not so much.
Product page [Onone]
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