Photokina 2018

[Birna Rørslett]

Foolography claim that they will be showing their new Unleashed product at this years Photokina. 

I would be interested in people's response(s) to this product if they make it to the Foolography stand.  TIA.

Olivier Pereira, the CEO of Foolography, demonstrated the new "Unleashed" and it certainly seemed to be both practical, robust and reliable. Pairing with the smartphone was near instant and and a far cry away from the miseries of Nikon's Snapbridge application. Unfortunately, I cannot myself use smartphones, which comprise a critical part of the setup, and with the phone removed, the remaining capability is about the same as with the ordinary old Foolography units. Frank, however, did purchase the "Unleashed" and might post further on this gadget.

[Hugh_3170]

Hi Birna, many thanks for checking this one out for me/us.   

My Olympus M43 cameras (the E-M1 Mk1 & 2) both have this capabiliy built in, and it is very painless to use.  Also provides for geo-tagging via the smart phone.  The latter works well enough, although maybe not as nice as the little blue tooth modules for the Nikons.  However the one smart phone can geotag for more that one Olympus camera at once so their way of doing things does have its pluses.  Also the geotag logs are stored as separate logs along with the geotagged images on the memory card.

I ordered a couple of the Unleashed modules for myself a long time ago as part of the early Kickstarter crowd funding of the project, so I am very pleased that you & Frank have seen them working and that as a result Frank has also seen fit to invest.

Olivier Pereira, the CEO of Foolography, demonstrated the new "Unleashed" and it certainly seemed to be both practical, robust and reliable. Pairing with the smartphone was near instant and and a far cry away from the miseries of Nikon's Snapbridge application. Unfortunately, I cannot myself use smartphones, which comprise a critical part of the setup, and with the phone removed, the remaining capability is about the same as with the ordinary old Foolography units. Frank, however, did purchase the "Unleashed" and might post further on this gadget.

[Alaun]

 

As a backer, I got mine already at the photokina.
It just works fine. I got the N1 version (I tested it with D200, D810, D4, D850, all with the round 10 pin socket). It comes with two little cables to connect it further with the USB socket (2 cables for 2 different USB sockets).
I use it with my apple phone (so far it seems Apple has restricted the download to phones, could not find the software for iPads, though in principle it should work there).
The connection with the USB port is needed for getting exposure settings and for downloading the picture (a small version) into the app. As it is a small picture, it works with the D850 also fine (no extensive waiting). When the phone went into sleeping mode, it takes about one or two seconds to reconnect, then it works instantly. If something does not seem to work, it is related to the settings on the camera (e.g. it seemed Af was not working, but that was due to my settings on the cameras).
After slightly more than a day, the reconnection did not seem to work. I guess this is due to some settings on the phone. I simply had to de-connect the little item and re-connect it again, then everything was fine again. Also the GPS-data from the phone get into the picture-file. It still recognises some cameras wrongly, but that is already known to foolography and it does not impact the functionality of the tool (they just did not have all cameras to read out the correct IDs).
 

[Hugh_3170]

Thanks Werner for your helpful write up. 

I was also a backer and I am waiting for my two units - I am guessing not too long for me now given that you have received yours.  I have a round 10-pin connector one and a Df version to come.

[Jacques Pochoy]

We’ll be heading to Luxemburg and then France.
Don’t worry. Maybe next time we can meet. Our schedule is kind of crazy as we are travelling by motorbike in easy rider style.
 Best regards.

If you get by Paris (and, alas, if my planning allows), we might be able to have a drink, from one motorbiker to another