EOS Utility version 2.10 improves tethered shooting

Many Canon camera owners miss out on the software that’s provided free with their cameras as they leave the EOS Solution disk in the bottom of the box along with the camera instruction manuals. One of the applications included free with every EOS camera is EOS Utility.

With the new EOS 600D there’s another version of the software applications disk this one is EOS Solution Disk 24. I managed to get a copy of the EOS Solution Disk from an EOS 600D camera and found that the EOS Utility version 2.10 has at least one new feature that will be useful to photographers who shoot with their camera tethered to a laptop, like in a studio situation.

In the older version 2.9 of EOS utility shown above, one of the preferences allowed you to choose if you wanted to save images on the camera memory card or only to the laptop hard disk when shooting tethered. If you choose not to save images on a card in the camera it’s possible to shoot without a card in the camera at all. However if you shoot RAW images they do take a lot longer to transfer than JPEG images due to their filesize, and most studio users will be shooting RAW.

Enhanced options for shooting tethered

The new version, as shown above, adds the option to only transfer the JPEG images to the computer if you are shooting RAW+JPEG on the camera. The reason this is important is that JPEG images are small and transfer very quickly over USB cables. You can now have a very quick preview on screen of the images as you shoot and still have a RAW image captured for later post production. Of course it will be even more important to make sure that you have choosen correct Picture Style and white balance settings in the camera as the JPEG will have these applied by the camera before transfering to the computer.

I actually think this is intended for photographers using the Canon wireless transmitter with the EOS utility, now only sending the small size JPEG instead of many megabyte RAW images will make transfers much faster. This feature is available in the wireless transmitters if you use them in ftp mode, but so many photographers seem to want to use the EOS utility connection.

At the moment the only way to get the new version is from the EOS Solution Disk 24 in the EOS 600D camera boxes, but I expect that it will be available from Canon’s software download services shortly. You will also need to update the Digital Photo Professional Application too if you use it since EOS utility and DPP work together and need to be matched.

Canon software download services: