Is Nikon Capture NX2 an April Fool’s joke?

I downloaded and installed the latest Nikon Capture NX2 version 2.2.0 today.

If there’s one reason not to shoot Nikon, it’s Capture NX2; I use it because it offers excellent image quality as well as correction of lateral chromatic aberration and (now with 2.2.0) axial chromatic aberration. It also offers vignetting correction and other goodies. A very nice feature set, world’s crappiest user interface.

And in terms of performance and bugs, it still remains the biggest pile of steaming shit ever foisted on digital shooters. On a 16-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro Nehalem, it’s still slow as mud, and still full of bugs that cause it to take take minutes to process a single image—if it doesn’t hang forever. As a programmer I can see there’s something very, very wrong with it internally (programming bugs), but my emails to various Nikon representatives go unanswered—maybe because they took a dislike to reality in The Good, the Bad, The Ugly.

If you know the head of NIK (Nikon’s software group), have him contact me please, these guys are oblivious to what manure they’re shipping to hapless customers (and charging for it).

After 3 minutes or so on a single file, one does lose patience

Helper application NkMC crashes every time when launching Capture NX2 or NikonView

But wait, it gets worse. During batch processing, Nikon Capture NX 2.2.0 now uses (on average) ~7% of one of the 16 available CPU cores eg 0.4% of the available processing power of the Mac Pro, taking half an hour or so to process 15 Nikon D3x NEF files. That’s not a typo: zero point four percent. Unbelievable.

Nikon Capture NX2 CPU usage during batch processing, not an April Fool’s joke