January 25, 2005

• A while back I mentioned that the Pentax image file management software sucks. Well, here's a semi-detailed list of my gripes with it; non-photo-geeks please skip.

  1) So far it has taken PENTAX PHOTO Laboratory 2.0 2-1/2 hours to process 20 RAW files into high quality JPEGs. I haven't run a time comparison against dcraw, there's just no excuse. It's like they didn't even test this software. No one ever ran it on a computer before shipping. Maybe my iBook is old, but I know for a fact that the camera can process this information quicker than 2-1/2 hours, and I doubt that my computer is slower than the camera. I'd use dcraw, but initial experiments have shown that there's much tweaking to learn before I'm happy with the results. And I'd experiment with the tweaking except:

  2) PENTAX PHOTO Laboratory 2.0 eats up your system. It does this in a couple of ways: 1) The software itself is unresponsive to the system. You can't just switch to it and watch it update the progress bar. It's so deep in thought it has no time for you. The only way to see what it's doing is to hide all the other applications. 2) It slows the computer down to grindingly slow. I can barely type what I'm typing now.

  3) PENTAX PHOTO Browser 2.0 is the image browser that ships with the camera, and it sucks twice as much as Laboratory. It takes ten years to do anything. It crashes. It misrepresents which files are where within the file system. And it's the ONLY WAY TO BATCH FILES FOR LABORATORY. That is, if you want to look at previews of RAW files and send them to Laboratory for processing as a batch, then you have to use Browser, because no other software can do this. And here's what happens once you send the batch for processing: Laboratory lets you tell where to save the processed files, and then it runs along on its merry (and painfully slow) way. Then, when any file within the batch is finished, Laboratory sends Browser to the front. The Browser window becomes the frontmost window, and you have to send it to the back in order to continue doing what you were doing. If Browser isn't running because you quit it because it's causing your computer to slow down to the point that you can't read your Xanga site, LABORATORY WILL LAUNCH IT AGAIN, just to annoy you.

  4) Laboratory also does this: The batch of files you send it will have at least one duplicate image, because Laboratory and Browser are buggy as shit. So when the whole batch is done, there will be a dialog which says, "The file foof.jpg%s already exists. Do you wish to overwrite? [cancel] [OK]" Now, first of all, any dipshit user interface author knows you don't ask a yes/no question, and then not give the user two answers: Yes and No. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that you can't do anything at all in Laboratory until you click either of these buttons, and, like I said, Laboratory doesn't know how to come to the foreground. There is no way to select the dialog window and click on it. It is perpetually greyed-out, and the only way to fix the problem is to force quit Laboratory.

  I really want to shoot (gun, not camera) whoever 'authored' this suckware. I'm also terribly disappointed in Pentax for shipping this crud.

  • 7:10 pm
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