iPad for field work

I couldn't find if this had already been discussed here but I just found out the iPad using the camera connection kit will support raw format. Just wondering what people think about possibly using it for checking out shots and maybe showing to clients while on the go instead of the camera's LCD.

Hell yeah I'll be using it for that. IPS screen are hard to find these days, especially for $500 and battery powered. That thing will make an amazing portfolio showcase, since it handles both video and stills. We're seriously considering replacing our portfolios with several iPads.

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Originally Posted by Sebastian

Hell yeah I'll be using it for that. IPS screen are hard to find these days, especially for $500 and battery powered. That thing will make an amazing portfolio showcase, since it handles both video and stills. We're seriously considering replacing our portfolios with several iPads.

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Ok good I'm not the only one thinking this way lol. Besides the fact that I NEED one kinda like I NEEDED the first gen iphone that I had to get off fleebay because they never came out in canada lol. If anyone is wondering I gave Apple Canada a ring today and they confirmed that it will handle ALL raw formats, I had called about .nef specifically but they told me .nef and all others.

I'm considering it but not thrilled that GEN 1 won't have an SD slot. I know, there is a dongle, adaptor, or what-have-you, but to me it loses some appeal. I just want to pop the card out of my camera and pop it into the device; if I hand it off to someone to view I don’t want to have to worry about the adaptor. I currently use a 4 inch digital picture frame, it is rechargeable and it has an SD slot and I just pop the card in and the pictures come up, works perfect for my needs.

Two months and counting. On several occassions now I was able to shoot, download and post-process using nothing but the iPad, the camera connection kit and a combo of Photogene and Filterstorm. Uploading to Dropbox/FTP was handled by GoodReader. Images were captured using both my LX3 and my Canon DSLRs. Overall, the experience is fluid and works exactly as advertised. So far I haven't had a chance to deal with more than around 100 images in a batch, but downloading is very quick (I only shoot RAW).

The real fun begins when it comes time to make selects. An album of 1400 images (from my desktop) opens INSTANTLY, and browsing is smooth as butter no matter what you do to it. You can swipe so fast the screen will be a blur, stop it and tap an image and it's up instantly. Even when at home, I prefer to download to the iPad and browse images on that with the desktop/laptop only used for archiving/keywording. For browsing of images I have never used anything faster. Though honestly this thing does everything faster than the equivalent on a desktop. How they manage to make it this fast with a 1ghz processor and 256 megs of RAM is beyond me.

Color me more than satisfied.

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Originally Posted by Sebastian

(I only shoot RAW).

You can swipe so fast the screen will be a blur, stop it and tap an image and it's up instantly.

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Intant loading for a RAW? - TF

Kind of. The iPad supports all the RAW formats that desktop OS X does, but at import it generates high-quality proxies that it uses for display/editing. If you want to roll your own RAW conversion you have to do it on a desktop using ACR/Aperture/Bibble/Phase One/etc.

That's actually a good distinction to make. On a desktop, loading the RAW file is not what's so time consuming, it's the actual interpretation of the RAW data.

I don't want to intimate that the iPad is a full-on replacement for a desktop in every occurrence, but for any amateur workflow it has a lot of benefits that in many situations make a laptop or desktop needless. And even in professional situations there would be many times I'd grab it instead of another machine, primarily for making selects but also for quickly exploring look ideas with a client.

RAW files usually have a built-in mini jpeg for display preview.
They could be using that ...