NIKON D4S help please...

Hiya

I was hoping you may help me please. I have bought the D4s and

the camera all seems very clear having used the D600 for the last

year. As a move to a pro body....it needs a CF card.

This may sound a silly question but I always simply just put the

small memory card into the computer from yhe d600 which would

automatically load into iphoto or lightroom etc.

There is no slot for the larger cf card used with the d4s so I have

bought a card reader (yet to arrive). Apparently you can load photos

using the usb straight from camera but you need to install the

software too. My mac doesnt take cds...its a new one whereby mac

ha e ditched the disc. I have read the part in the manual relevant....

but I am at a loss what to do ?

Normally I shoot raw and I simply need access to these files

straight to lightroom and photoshop.

any help appreciated

Thank you x

s

<p>Hi Sam. Firstly, I always use a card reader - and after spending a lot of money on a range of cheap card readers all of which played up a bit, I ended up with a Lexmark one, which actually works quickly on both my CF cards and SD cards (although it didn't work with an Eye-Fi). Not having a D4s (congratulations on your new toy), I can't speak for XQD cards, though. Still, I'd use an external reader if possible, partly because a tug on the cable is cheap if it damages a reader but not if it damages the camera, and partly because the connector on the D4s is only USB 2.0 (a good card reader is likely faster).<br />

<br />

For those reasons, along with reports of the software quality, I've never let Nikon's software near my computer. Are you sure the camera doesn't present content through a standard mechanism that the Mac understands? I'd expect it to look either like plain storage or like a media device, and you should be able to copy files off either. If Nikon have done something proprietary, I've never noticed, and that would be annoying of them.<br />

<br />

It appears that the only <a href="https://support.nikonusa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/61">downloads</a> Nikon offers are updates that rely on the original being installed. I don't really have a better (legal) option than getting hold of an external CD drive (which won't cost much - I recently bought a blu-ray writer and it still didn't come to that much) and doing the install from that. But if you're just trying to get at your files, I'm surprised it's necessary unless the D4s is unusual. For at least some cameras, Nikon <a href="https://support.nikonusa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17381/~/is-software-needed%3F">doesn't seem to think</a> it's needed. Good luck!</p>

Thanks Andrew that's a great response and I value what you say.

Yes I bout the same reader, which I simply bought because it was more expensive then the rest (so must be good haha) and I would be

gutted if something cheap messed up any of my files or camera.

I guess I shall wait until the reader comes before connecting it to the computer. I wouldn't want to risk anything.

Yes, I have never installed the software either, mainly out of laziness and I didn't get why exactly I needed it. I just want my files in the

RAW form for me to edit.

Looking at the manual....it simply says you can edit in the Nikon software. I wouldn't want to do that. So that's good to hear that it's not

imperitive for me to install. I think you are right. I don't think it's needed. I don't have this new card that the D4s takes......I don't know

anything about this new card apart from that it's pricey. So I just went with a decent CF card.

Thanks very much for your help. I do hope the reader comes soon, I really want to get editing these first shots on the new toy

Thanks again :D

<p>Guess if I had a D4S, I'd be going for this: http://www.lexar.com/workflow<br>

Haven't seen any small dual/triple format card reader that can handle XQD.</p>

<p>Glad to help, Sam. Please report back if direct connection doesn't work!<br />

<br />

My understanding is that XQD <i>is</i> faster than the fastest CF cards, but not by much. I actually found it annoying recently when considering hiring a D4s, because unless I'd been hired a card and reader, I'd have had no in-camera backup facility (a D3s would have been better for me for that event). The speed probably matters if you're shooting at 11fps a lot - but that would surprise me a little, given what I remember of our previous discussions. If you have a fast CF card (I made a point of buying the fastest CF and SD cards I could for my D800, because of the camera locking up until live view images are written) then you shouldn't be too disadvantaged. I only really noticed my cards were fast when I filled them at a recent wedding, swapped in a back-up (Eye-Fi class 10) card, and suddenly filled my buffer.<br />

<br />

For what it's worth, I've rarely seen any sign of a cheap reader messing up part way through a file transfer, but I try always to check the images in a previewer before I delete them anyway. I've seen some cards refuse to read at all, and the Lexar is the first one I've found that seems to go at full speed with both my Sandisk Extreme Pro SD and my Lexar Pro CF. The difference between that and my "USB 3" reader that a store recommended to me was quite scary - I was used to leaving a card transferring for half an hour. I hope it works as well for you.<br />

<br />

Meanwhile, is it not worth trying connecting the camera directly and seeing whether you can see it as a mass storage device?</p>

<p>Dieter: I've not seen a combined one either (workflow excluded) - though I'm not sure that XQD is exactly getting a lot of love that would justify it. UHS-II SD cards can keep the current XQD cards quite honest, although the XQD (particularly type 2) bus is capable of a lot more. Maybe we'll see more of it once we see devices that can use it, but until we see more devices capable of 4K recording, current cards aren't really all that limiting. There's a Sony dedicated XQD reader that doesn't seem all that huge or expensive, FWIW.</p>

<p>XQD read/write speeds are currently 400MB/s and 350MB/s, so they're quite a bit faster than the fastest CF cards (160MB/s/140MB/s). XQD cards don't have the pin breaking issue of CF, and they don't have a flexible, thin chassis like SD, so it would seem a good standard to settle on for advanced users but it seems that yet again the different manufacturers are divided on which card type to support, so it's difficult to know what will happen in the future. CFast 2.0 that seems to be Canon's answer to high speed storage needs, isn't used in any DSLR that I know of yet, though they have some cinema equipment coming up that support it, and it's about as expensive as XQD. No Nikon (or Canon) DSLR so far to my knowledge takes advantage of the SD UHS-II (280MB/s/250MB/s) standard. When evaluating cards to get for a camera, it makes sense to buy those cards that you need in the immediate future and not buy too many as they tend to get outdated quickly. I remember paying 300€ for 1GB of CF card storage for my first digital SLR. It seems so absurd today.</p>

<p>I don't know what software you are referring to, but on a mac, I believe reading a CF card through a card reader should work exactly like it does with an SD card (either on the built-in SD slot or SD plugged into a card reader) - the CF card should show up as a drive on the mac with no special software required. Then read directly into whatever photo software you use.</p>

Brilliant thank you so much I really value your help. Really this is terrific. I am so used to using SD cards that after I

bought the D4s last week and looked at the memory card slot I was quite confused. I now have the Lexar professional

32gb card and the Lexar professional reader, so this should work fine. I tried the camera out for the first time yesterday.

Gosh it's fast.....but I didn't really enjoy shooting at the 11fps. Seemed huge over kill given that I was just practising on my

son. if I have any problems I shall ask you guys for your help. Thanks again......never been an expert at computers :)))

<p>Greg: Agreed that card reader content should just show up as any other removable drive, like the internal SD reader (and it sounds like Sam's has now turned up). The only question was whether the camera doesn't behave like a card reader and requires something proprietary to access - but hopefully that's now not an issue.<br />

<br />

Sam: If you don't enjoy 11fps, can I have your D4s? :-) Good luck with it. It should have continuous low speed modes that are configurable if you want something less like a machine gun. My F5 is scary enough (and that's before you think about how expensive the film you just shot with it was - four and a half seconds per roll). That said, my V1 can keep up, and I've tried out an NX1 that goes faster, but neither of those flap a mirror quite as fast as a D4s (and I've never tried a 1Dx).<br />

<br />

Ilkka: Sorry, I was looking at the XQD cards that top out around 125-168MB/s read, which is better than the best CF cards, but not much. I see Lexar now have 200MB/s read, write "lower". I'd missed the Sony G series, which have the 400MB read/350MB write that you mentioned - that'll teach me to check B&H rather than Amazon. I wonder how much of a difference this makes on a D4s?<br />

<br />

You're right about the UHS-II cards - I only brought them up because adoption of XQD seems to be quite slow, and since UHS-II cards and slots are backward-compatible, I'd not be surprised if they gain slow adoption. There are a small number of cameras using UHS-II already. And I certainly agree about card cost - the 32GB SanDisk Extreme Pro I bought recently is a quarter of the price of the 16GB one I bought at the same time as my D800. But then, my trade-in value for my D800 was a quarter of what I paid for it, too!</p>

<p>In my experience with XQD and fast CF cards the XQD cards make the CF cards look like they are downloading through molasses in January. I a using Lexar Pro cards with max read speeds around 160 MB per second.<br>

The XQD cards get warm during download something I have never had a CF card do. <br>

In my D4 the difference in card read/write speeds does not really come into play. Where I see the difference in speed is on the download. <br>

I wish more cameras used XQD cards..Maybe the price would come down a little more</p>

Thanks for all help .....oh and Andrew yeah of course you can have my D4s no worries :p :D I will use the machine gun

factor at some point, but it's not needed to shoot a kid sitting on the floor looking cute ahahhah

<p>There are also commodity priced CD/DVD writers-readers that have fast USB connections if you still want to use optical media for backups.<br>

However, external 1TB HDs are also relatively inexpensive and often no bigger than a deck of cards.<br>

Never, ever force a CF card - if it doesn't slip in easily it's wrong somehow.</p>

<p>Hard drive failure is in my experience one of those things that one can count on happening. They can do it quickly or they can take their time. Personally I'm of the opinion that having only hard drive copies of images is a recipe for disaster. But optical hasn't kept up with storage capacity needs of today and writing blu-ray discs is really quite a slow process. I am more comfortable having optical copies of most important files because they aren't likely to destroyed by a power spike (unless we talk about fire caused by a lightning strike). And while there is thermal degradation of optical discs, and by mishandling they can be damaged (I basically never handle them), in my experience hard disk failure is much more probable than losing images on optical disks that are kept in storage. But in the last two years I haven't kept up with my optical backups; I'd have to cull so many images in order to be able to write them that I've developed quite a backlog.</p>

<p>I wish that I had the money to buy new cards for every shoot. Then I could always have yet one more backup of the original shots.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>