How many times have you been on vacation, and were frustrated that you can’t share the photos you took with your “good camera” on Facebook when you took them? (Now raise your hand if you ever took a 2nd picture with your phone just so you could post it!) The Wi-Fi and Near Field Communications (NFC) feature of this camera are designed to work with your smartphone to address this very scenario.
And in the continued blurring of the lines between camera and smartphone, the A6300 allows you to download “apps” that provide new features and special effects that you can invoke in-camera without needing Photoshop (or an even bigger computer).
Here’s what this chapter will talk about:
All of the smartphone examples I show in this chapter are done with my Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy S6 (yeah I’m a luddite)). An iPhone experience should be very similar except the NFC option will not be available (yes, most recent iPhones have NFC, but it can only be used for Apple Pay at the time of this writing). And a Microsoft Windows phone experience will be VERY different since Sony hasn’t yet released a PlayMemories Mobile app for that platform (This puts you spiritually closer to us old Minolta owners, who got used to the fact that the 3rd party world would ignore them completely.)
Figure 5-1: The NFC transceiver is located directly behind the fancy N logo on the camera’s side. Once it’s aligned with the NFC transceiver on the back of your smartphone (right), you can separate the two devices, and the Wi-Fi transfer will initiate. |
You’re probably already familiar with Wi-Fi, but what’s NFC and why should you bother with it?
The short answer is “NFC is the TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) for ‘Near Field Communication”, and once it’s configured, it can shorten the time to initiate something with the smartphone. For example, in order to send a picture I’m looking at on my camera to my smartphone, all I have to do is touch the side of the camera to the back of my smartphone. (Both have to be on, of course.) The app starts automatically on my smartphone, and a Facebook-friendly version of the image ends up on my phone seconds later, ready for me to share it with the world. So it can save a little bit of fumbling on both the camera and the smartphone.
The allowable distance between NFC devices is intentionally small – the official specification is no more than two inches. This was done to minimize the very real possibility of someone standing next to you in a crowded room and slurping up your phone’s contents without your knowledge or consent. (I sure wish the folks who decided putting RFID tags into U.S. Passports had taken that scenario into account before deciding it was a good idea.) Anyway, on this camera it’s even less than an inch. The sensor itself lies directly beneath the N logo on the camera’s side (Figure 5-1a). And at least with my smartphone the N logo must be placed EXACTLY where my NFC sensor is in my phone (which is completely unmarked, so I have to slide the camera around the back of the phone a little bit until I hear the “I found you!” sound - Figure 5-1b).
You can get this essential piece of software from the usual places: the App Store for the iPhone, Google Play store for Android.
You can’t do much when you run the app by itself, but I encourage you to do so just so you can change one setting. With the app running, hit the MENU button or icon (it varies from phone to phone; on Android phones it's three vertical dots) and choose “Settings”. The first option will be “Copy Image Size”. For a lot of reasons I recommend setting this to 2M if it’s not there already – that will mean your smartphone will receive an image of 1616 pixels wide x 1080 pixels high. Downloading the full-sized image just to post on Facebook is really overkill. (Why is it called “2M”? Because the image is roughly 1.7 MP, and they just rounded up. Once compressed and stored as a .jpg, though, the picture takes up only about 500 KB, making it ideal to send over your phone’s expensive data plan.)
If you’re traveling in a foreign country and your roaming data plan is something like $20/megabyte (it used to be that bad, and I’m sure it still is in some countries), then you might want to consider using the VGA option instead. VGA resolution is 640 x 480 pixels. (Which doesn’t sound like much, but you didn’t complain about it much in the 1980’s when that was the standard computer screen resolution.) The file size (when compressed as a .jpg) will be approx. 75 kilobits – perfect if you want to conserve as much of your data plan as possible and most people won’t think it’s a bad-looking image when viewed on their computer screens.
