Received my Arsenal camera Assistant this week after waiting one month after I had been notified it shipped. Firstly I paid $175 for my kickstarter device plus $20 for shipment - I live in UK. However I had a note through my door that they could not deliver my unit until all the duty fees had been paid. Call me old fashion but when you paid a shipment fee that implies landed costs - not so for shipments I had to pay 38 GBP additional fees approximately $48 so nearly $250 landed costs.
I am an iPhone user and I shoot with Sony AR7ii and GM lenses. I eventually got the system up and running for a short period of time until I could not make the iPhone app work. For some reason I could not focus my lens by touching the live view screen on the iphone and had an error message saying lens was switched to manual or had been locked which was not the case. I had a spare Android phone so switched to that - it does not have SIM card so wifi only data. In order for the Android phone to work I had to download a new version of firmware for Arsenal. Here's the thing if you switch from iPhone to Android you will need to update firmware each time on the Arsenal device as it only stores one image depending on the type of phone you have.
The android phone app worked better but the UX was very confusing. It is unclear or not obvious what program mode you are supposed to set your camera to to make this work. I started with Aperture Priority. In terms of being able to set camera variables - these were the options available to me - aperture, IOS, and EV compensation. Shutter speed was not available as a variable to set. Also in the Android version I was using prior to their updated version they released this week it seemed to allow you to set exposure bracketing, focus stacking, and long exposure stacking all simultaneously which completely through me so UX was very confusing and unhelpful. I do not believe it is intended for all three different types of stacking to be available simultaneously and that one or other should be selected. For shooting I used the "Smart" mode on the assistant. This was because when I tried to play with manual mode - the online video suggests you can change your camera program mode through this all I had was a greyed out box with "aperture" representing the programme mode I had previously set - needless to say it was not and still is not possible to change the programme mode on my Sony AR7II with Arsenal set to "manual" as depicted in the video.
I went to Bushy Park yesterday morning with camera tripod and assistant looking to try out two specific applications exposure stacking and long exposure stacking. It was early morning cold winters day and I set my tripod up and camera on one side of a lake with the sunning coming up on the other side behind a big tree. I wanted to test the auto mode for exposure compensation so set the camera assistant to exposure bracketing and auto and turned off the other stacking functions so that only exposure would trigger. Pointed the camera and assistant at the sun which created a HDR image and boom took the picture only for the Arsenal Assistant to do nothing. Basically the auto function did not pickup the HDR image it was presented with . I tried this with a different view and same thing happened. So this time I set the exposure bracketing (1 stop interval) to manual on the settings function of the camera assistant via the mobile app - this time it triggered - you can see a selection of the HDR results I achieved here - https://www.flickr.com/photos/adil_pastakia/albums/72157698765508610 It could be that my camera settings were wrong but difficult to work out as the instructions are not well written or that intuitive or that I needed larger stops - needless to say the composite image produced was not very complimentary - there is no post processing carried out on the image shown.
The next thing I tried was long exposure stacking. There was no running water only a still partly frozen lake so wanted to see if could capture cloud movement that was coming in so tried to composites one at 10 images and one at 6 images - the composite images can be found here https://www.flickr.com/photos/adil_pastakia/albums/72157704658810685/with/31386352087/.
Firstly I was surprised that the composite image (stacked image) is not written to the SD card on the camera. Whats more it is only a Jpeg file which was about 2M bytes in size which quite small for camera source that has 42.6 M sensor! My raw files are over 80M each. With the Sony AR7ii the USB cable is redundant, instead you have to connect using the play memories app using "Smart Remote Control" making sure you have RAW and JPEG selected if you want any capture in Raw, and use the wifi access point generated by the camera to connect the app and the assistant. Third generation Sony cameras AR73 will use the UBB cable. However since the final composite image is not saved on the SD card - instead all of the other individual images which are used to form the stacked image are saved on the SD card and "Smart Remote Control" does not have a RAW only capture but does have RAW and jpeg which means each image used for the composite is saved as a JPEG and RAW on the SD Card. This is quite wasteful - the Play memories app "Smooth Reflection" achieves similar results but writes a final composite image (jpeg and RAW) to the SD card but does not save any of the intermediate shots. Battery life on the Sony AR7ii is a challenge and to accommodate the Arsenal Assistant you are having to run wifi which is battery intensive as well as saving all these additional intermediary images.
When I noticed the new release of software after I returned from my morning shoot, I immediately updated the Android version I had been using only to find out that the composite images which had been visible from the mobile app had disappeared. It appears not only are the images not written to the SD card of the camera they are NOT automatically saved to the mobile device you are using which is a huge oversight. The only way you get a permanent copy of the composite image if you manually save the image to the gallery or device. Composite images as far as I can see are only available in jpeg format - so not the RAW I had originally expected - at least for the Sony variant.
When the mobile app is disconnected from the Arsenal device you cannot even look at the images it had captured via the app - you need to have the camera and assistant connected for you to be able to review the pictures taken with the device - this is because images are not stored on the phone permanently unless you manually save them.
Finally I have sent of 3 -4 messages to their support team about the technical problems and not had a single acknowledgement back - even sent them images for analysis. Not one peep from them about the problems I have been having. THIS IS A HUGELY DISAPPOINTING EXPERIENCE FROM A TECHNICAL AND CUSTOMER SUPORT PERSPECTIVE - will try a few more scenarios now I have my iOS version of the app working (after yet another firmware upgrade) and see if I have any better results. This certainly does not appear to do what it says on the tin. BUYER BEWARE
