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The worst Nikon feature — software

Nikon Capture NX2 has a great feature set and excellent image quality, but with the world’s least usable user interface yet seen in a RAW converter. See my Capture NX2 review; it only captures a portion of the user-interface headaches in NX2.

Nikon Capture NX 2 has always had a reputation for being ultra-slow, but version 2.1.1, which supports the D3x, now is far worse—

Slow Mode malfunction

NX2 v2.1.1 now incorporates a malfunction that I’ll call Slow Mode, which it enters frequently, at least with D3x files: it will literally take several minutes to draw a preview of the image, or even worse, never finish drawing it at all. Slow Mode is not related to complexity of processing; it happens with most adjustments disabled too.

When NX2 is operating in Slow Mode, it chews up barely more than a single CPU core (out of 8), with little or no forward progress on the screen preview. The problem is provoked especially frequently (nearly all the time) when keeping multiple files open at once. Memory is not the issue; its memory usage is about 1.1GB, so it should be able to allocate another 2GB for its own use. Working with a single open file does not avoid the issue.

Even when not malfunctioning in Slow Mode, NX2 use of CPU cores is at best 200% in interactive mode (800% is all cores of my 8-core Mac Pro, see my grading system for software). On its best behavior (rare) when outputting a TIF, it might use 300% - 400% eg less than half of the available processing power of my 8-core Mac Pro.

Irresponsible RAW-file modification

RAW files are your original work, your digital slide or negative. They should not be altered! Doing so is really not forgivable.

The engineers at Nikon/Nik are still writing into the original RAW file, violating a fundamental principle of data integrity: don’t risk damage to original RAW files (this is not theoretical, it happened when Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.5).

NX2 also bloats RAW files by 30% when saving, resulting in D3x files up to 50 (fifty) megabytes each! You have no choice or preference—NX2 just does it.

I raised this issue with Nikon last June when I attended the NX2 preview, but nothing has been done about either issue.

Nikon View NX “unsupported file format”

View NX 1.2.0 (latest version as of 12/28/2008 for Mac) reports that D3x files are an “unsupported file type”. The latest Windows version is 1.2.2.


Nikon View NX 1.2.0 and Nikon D3x RAW files

View NX 1.2.0 is the latest version for Mac OS X, but if you Check for Updates you get a nice crash of whatever (unnecessary) daemon process Nikon uses to open the web page.


Nikon View NX 1.2.0 and Nikon D3x RAW files

 


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