Credit where credit’s due

I am not a rusted-on proponent of any particular manufacturer or brand. I do tend to have high expectations of my tools and I‘m pretty willing to put the boot in where appropriate and to change sides where necessary. In this I’d say photographers are mostly alike.

But you can easily run the risk of being quick to condemn when things go wrong, and slow to give credit where credit’s due. And so what follows is a bit of both.

I’d recently heard reports that encouraged me to take a look at Capture One, the reputable competitor to Apple and Adobe in the field of photographic post production. Doing what we do now unfortunately necessitates a lot of time spent in front of computers, and so fine-tuning your processes can save many hours per month.

This came at a time when I was experiencing a couple of minor frustrations with my regular tool of trade, Aperture, for which I hoped Capture One might offer some solutions.

The first of those problems was wireless tethering.

When an assignment is suited to shooting tethered, either because of the volume of pictures or for the convenience that a computer screen brings to collaborating with an Art Director, doing so sans cable is great. But managing that setup in a way that’s robust enough not to encumber your shoot with constant technical interruptions is easier said than done. (There’s a good reason dedicated DAM people now exist.)

At eight seconds per picture, Aperture had been a bit slow off the mark, and so I was happy to discover Capture One receiving and displaying raw files for all intents and purposes as fast wirelessly as it did via ethernet — in about three seconds from the shutter to the screen. But that joy didn’t last, as pictures began to appear at their destination either corrupt or not at all. The program proved incapable of receiving anything larger than the smallest JPEG files.

So I started corresponding with the manufacturer, sure that such a basic problem would be more an error of mine than theirs. But following some weeks of toing and froing it was decided that I’d discovered a glaring bug. I found it hard to believe I was the first person in the world to alert them to such a major problem in their product’s basic operations, and that they hadn’t discovered it themselves in the course its testing.

So they said they’d get their engineers onto it and report back to me. And I haven’t heard a peep since.

I couldn’t escape the feeling that the company’s focus was entirely on selling its $44,000 hardware and not at all on supporting its $399 software.

While I was left a little bitter about the service, the product nonetheless appealed to me. But as it didn’t actually work properly, and with the manufacturer proving so unresponsive, the decision was made for me, and that was that.

Then, not a week later, as if tipped off by a-fly-on-the-wall observer to the Phase One experience, I received an unprompted telephone call from an Apple employee asking how Aperture was serving me and whether there was anything I needed from them by way of training or support. When I mentioned the tethering problem (and my second issue, which was studio-lit pictures looking too flat after ingestion), the caller offered to sit down with me to come up with some tailored fixes.

Little did Apple know that this unsolicited offer, made right when I needed it, was also perfectly timed to contrast with the complete lack thereof from Phase One.

I guess you could argue the telephone call from Apple might have been just as much about the money you must have spent on their hardware in order to run Aperture in the first place, and that if I’d shelled out $44,000 on a Phase One digital back they might have shown me a similar level of interest. But first impressions count, and therein lies a strong argument against me buying one of their digital backs (that and the fact I don’t actually need one).

Now I am not a paid evangelist for Apple, and any of their products that I have I’ve paid for in full. Nor is this some kind of viral marketing plug. It’s just that the contrast between one company’s after sales support for a $90 product and another’s presale apathy over a $399 one was strong enough to do two things.

It confirmed my position as a satisfied customer of one of them, and it prompted me to whinge publicly about the other.