Something that never ceases to amaze me is how a company like Nikon, a company whose products produce very large media files can turn its back on customers who buy hardware designed to work with those media files.
Say you’ve got a folder containing a couple thousand 11MB .NEF RAW image files from a wedding you just shot, and now you need to edit those photos, would you rather be doing it on some crippled 32-bit machine that suffers from stability issues, can’t support more than 4GB of RAM, can’t even use all of the 4GB it does have because of limits in the way the OS is built, etc, or would you rather be running an x64 OS that removes those limitations, is more stable, and performs better?
Well I and thousands of other photographers like me (if you read the blogs) are using x64 based processors and software for those reasons and more and are continually frustrated by the lack of software for applications and business requirements that really benefit from x64 hardware.
Nikon’s failure to ship, or even announce that they are working on an x64 version of their .NEF codec for Vista x64 shows a lack of understanding of their target market that boggles the mind. Their capture NX product that is supposed to compete with Adobe Photoshop doesn’t even open .NEF files when launched from the command prompt (at least in my tests it didn’t), and who knows what the plans are for the Camera Control and other Nikon apps.
Please, if you have any Nikon equipment, log onto the Nikon web site and submit a technical question asking when they will be shipping their x64 .NEF codec for Vista, and when their other products will work with x64. They only way they’ll do anything about it is if they get hundreds of thousands of requests … so please take a minute to submit your feedback to them now.
Darren Myher's Blog 