58bits

Nikon ViewNX – You Suck

Submitted by Anthony Bouch on 12 June, 2009

Some applications deserve ‘outing’ and Nikon ViewNX is one of them. I’ve used at least a dozen image editors, viewers, managers over the years – and the one that potentially means the most to me – sucks big time.

Not long ago I bought some of Nikon’s top gear. I love their lenses, and the new FX bodies are out of this world – but Nikon – you need to get your software in order.

Below is a screen shot of Process Monitor – filtered for Nikon ViewNX. I stopped recording events after we hit two million. That’s 2,309,221 file system events – and Nikon ViewNX was still going strong.

What’s more, ViewNX and Capture NX 2 appear to have been developed by different teams (not even able to agree on where the NX should go), using different explorer components and other features. That’s just silly – since the navigation panel is an obvious candidate for object reuse. Not sure who’s UI tools they’ve used to skin their applications – but they both occasionally ‘drop’ their skin and revert to Windows classic chrome.

I don’t underestimate the size of the task in producing Mac and Windows versions of fairly hefty applications – but you guys need to do better than this. Capture NX even featured in a recent YouTube parody over the Nikon D3x – so I’m not alone in my concerns about Nikon software.

Bummer…

Comments

I may as well comment on the shoes and NX…totally agreed on the ecoo shoes, although i wear Geox most days…
Nikon NX does the job great, it's still need more work on stability and it should be free when you get a high end camera (Nikon is a stingy company…) does it matter too much if there a ton of process in the background, HD real estate is cheap enough…

Submitted by Anthony Bouch on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 07:50

Hi Roland. Glad we agree on the shoes :-)

There are a few problems with Nikon's software strategy. For starters - developing Nikon View NX and Nikon Capture NX 2 using separate outsourced teams is silly. They've duplicated many core components - like the explorer tree and metadata editors. Secondly - while View NX is free - it's performance is very poor - at least the Windows version is, especially when compared to a product like Photo Mechanic (which is now my preferred image manager and metadata editor - switching to Capture NX 2 when I want to make basic adjustments to NEF raw files).

And I agree that Capture NX 2 should come free with their high end gear.

Submitted by Anonymous1 (not verified) on Fri, 05/07/2010 - 07:55

Nikon SUCKS
I hate everything about their company
They sponsored Superman Returns (useless crap of film)
Nikon SUCKS & SUCKS

Submitted by Bill (not verified) on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 06:00

I agree. I have a new MacBook Pro, and Nikon ViewNX is constantly crashing, seizing "not responding", overheating the CPU, etc. POS software, and I intend to switch to Lightroom soon.