ControlMyNikon

Control Your Nikon Camera With Your PC

Current Status

Well it's been awhile since we had a new release! Version 5 was first released back in 2013....has it really been 11 years? That was a solid version, coded in Delphi as a 32-bit app, running on Win 7, 10 and eventually 11. Users had free upgrades for all 11 years! It was fun. But technology changes, of course!

Onward to version 6

More bits, newer Windows

Now the app needs to be 64-bit so it can use the new Nikon SDK (used to be 32-bit, now 64-bit). High DPI monitors and display scaling needs to work properly as the old win32 GDI graphics drawing calls can look awful and be sluggish on Win10/11. The new Nikon Z bodies require some special handling as we are transitioning from an era of phase focus/optional live view to contrast focus/live view is always on. Big, big changes.

We all have GPUS now, right?

Way back in 2013-ish, some, but not most users had a GPU in their Windows PC. If you were lucky, it might work with OpenGL drivers. So accelerated graphics was tricky to achieve. Version 6 is written in 64-bit .NET using the WinAppSDK/WinUI - Microsoft's updated development framework. This framework requires a GPU and if the GPU is too weak, it emulates quite well on the CPU.

So now it looks perfect on any kind of monitor DPI and scaling, and is fast because it uses your computer's GPU for all the graphics work. Night and day difference, really.

Keeping it local

Version 6 will require Windows 10 or 11 and will be installable from a download from our website. The same kind of free trial thing will exist. No subscription required when purchasing. Likely a similar price. Not sure if there will be a version 5-to-6 upgrade price. All images are stored on your computer only. No AI stuff. No cloud. You run it completely locally. As it should be. Runs fine on my 10 year old dev PC. Runs fine on the cheapest Win11 laptop I could find on Amazon. Supports all Z bodies with a Nikon SDK as well as most of the non-Z bodies in version 5.

Bring on the Z's!'

So what about the Z bodies? Incredible cameras. Live view is a treat with a higher resolution stream. Going from version 5 640x420 to version 6 800x600 or slightly higher is really nice. The live view is piped into your GPU compute shaders for processing and display. Really nice. And shooting is so quiet. Now you can focus stack like crazy and not worry about mirror wear or vibration. Been using a Z50 for development and have been very, very happy. Looking forward to seeing more Z bodies in the future.

So where is it?

It's on a dev screen somewhere and will be released soon. We needed to wait for the dust to settle on the Nikon Z/64-bit changes as well as Microsoft's new approach to desktop app development, so it's been a lengthy process. So a complete rewrite was needed, and this has been happening on and off for almost two years. Just need to finish the triggers and some workflows.

Much time has been spent going through tens of thousands of customer support emails from the past decade, looking for ideas and tweaks to workflow processes. The new image browser is much better. The new live view looks great. The installer...still working on that. It has been out on a very limited private beta for too long.

SO MANY QUESTIONS

Will there be a ControlMyCanon 6? Probably not, but you never know.

Will there be a MacOS version? Probably not, but you get the idea.

Will it initially be released as a public beta? Unknown.

Here's a couple of screenshots.

Live view showing a backlit smokey quartz specimen. Streaming on a Z50 as 1024/x680 at approx 20fps showing on the debug info panel.

Image browser showing a Canadian 5 cent coin. Coincidentally, this is the year that development of ControlMyNikon 1 began, so I couldn't resist. You'll see some metadata items have not been translated properly, so show a @ prefix.

So there we go. ControlMyNikon 6. Soon.

Cheers,

Russ
Developer of ControlMyNikon