tethering without wires

I love Sony cameras, but sometimes I feel a little bit left out in the cold by manufacturers, I even sometimes feel they don’t care or don’t realize that Sony is really very fast becoming a major (if not THE major) player. For example I’ve been bugging CamRanger since day 1 for Sony support, their response is very basic… it won’t work and it will never work because Sony doesn’t support it…. well it’s weird that Capture One for example shows live view (which according to CamRanger is not possible…. don’t get me wrong I LOVE Camranger, heck I would buy one if they would support Sony in a heartbeat.

 

What do we/I really need?
Something a lot of manufacturers seem to miss.
For me personally I don’t need to see my live view, I don’t need to do settings or anything else fancy, I just want my images to come in, preferable the JPGs in small sizes, show the images and that’s it.

 

Now where do I want it?
The new iPad pro has me all excited, and yeah I know it’s “just” an iPad but the screen size is very handy for us on location and I strongly believe that (because it’s Apple) Adobe and other app makers will start making apps especially for the iPad pro and to be honest I see myself working on an iPad Pro much more than on my MBP when flying or traveling. So my initial thoughts was to use the Sony Remote control software to shoot tethered to my iPad Pro during workshops (which we now already sometimes do during location workshops with small groups) and that works flawless, however…. we can’t get the files to my MBP, so I was actually looking into that and while searching for solutions I found a company called DSLRdashboard

 

You might know their software for iPad, iPhone and Android, but you might not know they also have a desktop version, well at least I didn’t, and it works flawlessly just connect the Sony via their smart remote app to the wifi network and start the software, search for Sony and within seconds you’re up and running. And it’s fast, plus we tried it out throughout the whole studio area and we have pretty good coverage everywhere, so I’m very happy with this. Now the only thing Sony needs to fix is that the EVF doesn’t work in smart remote (which it did in the past).

 

But is that all?
No.
While doing my research online I more and more became convinced that although CamRanger might not support Sony there must be another solution, the CamRanger is in essence a rebranded and customized TP-Link router so what did they do, well very quickly you will find out that there is a firmware flash option that will run a modified firmware on the router and that will actually transmit your files, as long as the camera has a PC-Remote option, which the Sony has. So I thought “why doesn’t it work”… and the more I looked online the more it puzzled me, according to all the programers it would work with any camera that has PC-Remote and according to the app makers it wouldn’t work…. but what doesn’t work. If you read closely they all talk about the fact that Sony doesn’t allow to change settings etc. but I don’t care about that, I just want the files to come in and I couldn’t care less about time-lapse etc.

 

So I decided to just order the TP-Link somewhere and as soon as it’s in I’m gonna try to make it work to transmit just the JPGs, so keep looking at my blog and social media for this, I could be totally wrong but in my opinion it should be possible to do it, if the Sony smart Remote can make a connection and transfer RAW or JPGs why not via a router, what’s the difference if you only need JPGs…. I’m not a programmer but it doesn’t seem like much to just show images to students right?  we will see 😀

 

Anyway, long story short.
Here is a video in the digital classroom series on wireless tethering, and I also included a tip to shoot tethered with your iPhone without the need for internet 😀
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