Glass Lantern's PocketLoupe

Glass Lantern's PocketLoupe

My quest began like this: I had finally gotten the money together to trade up from my Canon D30 to a 1D. This would be a very good thing for my photography because it would allow me to shoot sequences of the extreme sports that make up the majority of my "working" photography. I was plenty excited with the 1D when I got it (as I should be for the price), except for one little thing. Well, actually one HUGE thing. For some reason, there was no "magnify" function when viewing images on the LCD. Which means that, unlike almost every other digital camera on the market (all the way down to my $250 Canon s200), I couldn't check focus in the camera. True, nobody ever got to check focus when shooting film. But this is practically an inexcusable omission in a $3700+ camera body. But since the 1D was the only camera that did what I needed it to do (8 FPS and a big 20-shot buffer), and the AF seemed to be pretty accurate, I kept the camera.

But I decided to see if there was a way that I could check my focus on some sort of external device. The obvious way was to drag along my iBook laptop and use it. This works very well, but is a little bulky to haul around all the time. However, I knew that Dell and some Compaq PDAs had CF slots, so I decided to look into file viewing programs for PocketPC devices. While stumbling around the net, I heard about Glass Lantern's "PocketLoupe" program. People were saying that it did a great job of pulling up images quickly, much faster than the standard PPC JPEG viewers. So I thought I'd check it out.

Downloading and Installing the PocketLoupe Program

The download from Glasslantern's website is an easy one, just click http://www.glasslantern.com/products/index.htm. Being only 100KB, it took me only a few seconds with my cable modem. Once downloaded you run the little setup program and Pocketloupe is set to install on you PDA the next time you sync it with your computer.

Using PocketLoupe

Once installed, using Pocketloupe is very easy. Start your Pocket PC, put in your media card, and start up the program. A thumbnail of the first image on the card will show up almost instantly with a little progress bar that shows the larger image loading.

PocketLoupe Thumbnail View

Once the image loads (less than 10 seconds for my dSLR files) a larger version will pop up on the screen. The program will read JPEG, TIFF, or "RAW" digital camera files.

Initially the images are orientated horizontally, but there is a button on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen that will let you rotate the images to take advantage of the Pocket PC's rectangular screen and show a larger image. Once the image is loaded you can click the magnify icon at the bottom or tap on the image to zoom in and check focus or motion blur, etc. This actually works pretty well. My Dell Axim has a pretty reflective screen, so it is not that easy to do in bright situations. But that is no fault of the program, and it is a problem that can be easily solved with a little bit of shade.

For me, being able to zoom in and check the focus is all that I really needed this program for. But it does have some other features that may come in handy for other people. You can check the image's histogram (see image below), delete images, view EXIF data (shutter speed, file name, ISO setting, white balance setting, etc.), and even tell Pocketloupe to make a small thumbnail (64 pixels wide I think). I actually was able to make the thumbnail, save it to my Pocket PC's built in storage, then e-mail it to myself using my Wi-Fi compact flash card.

PocketLoupe Histogram View

After thinking that I was clever for doing this, I realized that there is a "send as e-mail" option in the Pocket Loupe menu that lets you use the Pocket PC's e-mail program to send a bigger version of the file (100 pixels approx.). But since I don't use the built in e-mail program, I wasn't able to test it.

Summary

All in all, Pocket Loupe is a great little program that does just what I wanted it to. My Pocket PC now has a more or less permanent place in my camera backpack.