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Nikon View Software Review Test
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INTRODUCTION

This comes free with the camera or you can download it here.

Nikon Capture, available here, is a completely different program for advanced users shooting in RAW.

It is used for downloading images from your camera or a card reader to your computer.

It also can rotate the vertical images and add copyright information to the hidden data in the files.

The newer NV5 also allows you to do some things with images stored on your computer.

NV4 and NV5 are very different programs.

The older NV4 is pretty good, except it can't run on Mac OSX. NV4 only works on images from the camera or a card reader and is very effificent at rotating and transferring them to your computer. It does nothing with files already in your computer. NV4 on Mac will show haw many images are in each folder in the camera or on the card; the PC version can't. NV4 can delete whole folders on the camera (NV5 can't). NV4 allows you to select and download one folder at a time, NV5 can't.

The new Nikon View 5 is poor for downloading images from your card or camera. It expects you to download everything at once and then work with the files on your computer's hard drive. It only allows downloading the entire card at once. One cannot download just one folder from a large card. This makes it useless for me. If you rotate an image still on your card it will make that image unreadable by your camera! It will run on OSX, but it is so slow as to be useless. NV5 really only works on images on your computer. It is pretty worthless because it is so confusing and slow. There are much better programs you should use for the functions NV5 attempts, specifically, I use iView for sorting and rotating.

The NEF reader from NV5 is much better than the one from NV4. Not only does it work 3 times as fast decoding, it also allows one to change the exposure and WB settings!

Remember using this software is optional and it's free, so there's nothing that horrible with it being bad.

 

PERFORMANCE

Ease of Use

NV4 is easy to use and very helpful.

NV5 is confusing and pretty useless. It is so slow it really does not work on Mac.

Speed

NV4, including image rotations, is instantaneous on PC. It is much slower on Mac but still . I suspect Nikon never wrote the software for Mac but instead just did a sloppy translation from a Windows program, a very foolish thing.

NV5 is awful on Mac. It takes forever to do anything and crashes on OSX. The only reason to use NV5 is that it allows you to read more embedded data than you can see in some other programs. For instance, it allows you to read the time the photo was made to the tenth of a second.

Data

 

COMPARISONS

MEMORY CARD SUGGESTIONS

SUMMARY

Use NV4 on your PC or Mac OS9 to rotate and download.

Forget NV5 for anything. NV5 is an honorable attempt by Nikon to provide you with some very helpful tools at no cost, however I prefer to spend a little more ($50 for iView) for much better fucntioonality.

On Mac OSX just drag-copy folders from the card to your hard drive in Mac's Finder, and then use iView to catalog and rotate.

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