Comment by synackrst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by synackrst | Hacker News Reader

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This is slowly changing, at least with some of the high-end consumer/prosumer Sony cameras. I'd like to see some of the other features in your list added, but Sony's past slowness to add features doesn't inspire much hope that they will be added any time soon.

All of the recent (4+ years) cameras have a "share to mobile" feature, where the camera acts as an AP, and your phone connects to pull photos from it. You can either pick the photos to transfer on the camera or on the phone, and it works pretty well for posting to social media, or instantly sharing.

I've run the RX100M3/M5 and a7iii off of USB power forever (a full day's worth of being a webcam via HDMI capture). You can get a battery eliminator for the older a7 models -- while it does require additional hardware and hassle, they do work, and can run off of USB.

The a7iii _finally_ supports some level of geotagging by using the GPS in your phone, and using a BLE connection to get location. It's not as good as a built in GPS, but it's better than recording a track log and syncing later.

There's a lot of functionality, but all of it is clunky as hell. Connecting to the camera is a PITA, the apps on the camera (at least my a6300) are slow as molasses.

I updated the -- again, full featured, but clunky -- remote app earlier and had to enter my account information using the camera 4-way stick, one letter at a time, as if it's 1995.

Edit -- forgot the best part: during the update, the camera locked up displaying "Updating, do not turn off". Lovely. (I turned it off -- removed the battery --, it still works.)

EXACTLY. Many cameras have had PITA wifi sharing modes for over 10 years now, even eyefi existed for quite a while. It's just clunky as hell, slow and annoying that you might as well not use it. They're stuck in some stagnation loop.

> All of the recent (4+ years) cameras have a "share to mobile" feature, where the camera acts as an AP, and your phone connects to pull photos from it. You can either pick the photos to transfer on the camera or on the phone, and it works pretty well for posting to social media, or instantly sharing.

In the case of Nikon, the proprietary app for doing this was quite terrible, across all of their cameras that I tried it with. They released a firmware that opened up things up in the past year, though; better late than never. There have been brute-forced reverse-engineered alternative solutions but they have always been a pain to set up, use and maintain.

I suspect the other manufacturers' apps wouldn't be much better.

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