MAC OS-X 10.5.7 good news for tethered shooters

If you use an Apple MAC and have OS-X 10.5 then most likely you've been running 10.5.6 lately, but now 10.5.7 is now available to download and if you didn't get it already do so...

In MAC OS 10.5.6 Apple seemingly broke the tethered shooting functions making it very tough for users to shoot with cameras connected to the laptop. Typical symptoms include freezing of the whole computer, lock up of DPP or EOS Utility or similar. Usually it happens after around 15 minutes of continuous tethering, sometimes after 20 or more images have been transferred. MAC OS-X 10.5.7 seems to fix this, though there's no mention of fixes to USB on the update release notes.

To try it out we hooked up an EOS-1D Mark III and left it in live view mode for over 30 minutes it was still all alive and working and we could then pick the camera up and shoot a couple of hundred frames straight in to the MAC; just like you could do with MAC OS-X 10.5.5.

One thing that 10.5.7 brings is support for RAW images from EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 50D and PowerShot G10 according to the release note information.

-blabpictures-

MAC OS 10.5.6 - teething problems for tethered shooting

Just a quick note to share some experience of tethered shooting using EOS Utility with Apple MAC OS-X 10.5.6. It's best if you don't do it!
10.5.5 worked fine, but somehow Apple seems to have broken something with 10.5.6. Even Apple's own support forums have people complaining. If you have installed 10.5.6 as part of the MAC auto update then you don't have a simple way back to 10.5.5, but help or hope at least, is in sight. Apple has just released 10.5.7 to it's beta testers so let's all hope that will fix what Apple broke in 10.5.6.

If you have a MAC with OS-X 10.5.6 and tether your EOS camera to it let us know your opinion in the comments. From our experience a few minutes of Live View mode shooting will usually lock the machine up, and some tethered shooting, say 100 shots, tends to be enough to cause the lock up.

One other thing that we have seen is that even using a camera over PTP mode WiFi still causes the same problem as shooting with it tethered on USB.

Windows users can gloat here at this MAC glitch, but at least the fix for the USB bug seems to be near. Unlike Vista which has sufficient issues that I would recommend an install of Windows XP.

-blabpictures-