Nikon Crapture NX unusable again (Mac)
You can’t make this crap up.
As I’ve reported on several occasions (like last April), Nikon Capture NX2 (see review) has a terrible bug that Nikon seems wholly incapable of fixing, or even of contacting me about (and yes I have told my contacts at Nikon).
Don’t confuse the world’s worst-ever user interface, crashes, and severe performance issues with image quality, the reason I still like to use Crapture NX2‚ when it will function.
And so, I hereby rename it Nikon Crapture NX2, which shall be its name on this site until the problem is fixed (if ever). It’s a sporadic bug on some machines, and not everyone experiences it, but on my Mac Pro, it happens 80% of the time, with 100% of the time stretches some days.
Speed with Crapture NX2 varies from slow to glacial, the glacial speed being the manifestation of the bug. On my Mac Pro 8-core 2.93GHz with 64GB memory, Crapture NX2 is taking 134 seconds (over 2 minutes) just to open a single file (the issue occurs with 12GB or 24GB or 48GB also). Zoom to fit screen.... five more minutes. This problem has existed for at least 18 months on 3 different Mac Pros in Leopard and Snow Leopard, and no uninstall/reinstall changes anything. On my MacBook Pro, it takes about 2 seconds to open the same image.
Batch mode is awful too, as Crapture degenerates badly with more images. I started a batch job of 128 NEF files on my 8-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro with 48GB memory, and here is Crapture 90 minutes later (that is not a typo), using about 18% of a single core, in a pathological state of making almost zero progress.
If anyone out there has software developer contacts at NIK or Nikon, please have them contact me. I’d be more than happy to help Nikon track down their bug, which from the stack dump appears to be a multi-threading synchronization issue, with the threads locked up in critical sections or semaphores. In the meantime, I’m forced to use my MacBook Pro, since it runs Crapture NX2 at reasonable speed.
