I've always wanted to control my camera from my computer and decided it was time to see if I could get this to work. I knew that Canon had some utility to do this, but didn't have an idea where to start. Looking at my Start menu under Canon Utilities I saw an item called EOS Capture 1.5...hmm, looks promising. Upon expanding that item it had two choices, Readme or Uninstall. That stinks. So I went to the Canon website and navigated to the download section for my 5D. There was an Updater for a program called EOS Utility 2.4 (not very descriptive) so I tried to download this. I received an error message that since I didn't have the previous version, I could not install it. That stinks. So how does one get an old version? I am up here in Montréal and do not have all my regular CDs and stuff but luckily I had an older EOS Solution CD. It had software for ZoomBrowser, DPP, EOS Capture, PhotoStitch, PhotoRecord, etc. but no EOS Utility. So I decided to try to install the EOS Capture again since the version on my machine was impotent.
I loaded the CD and went through the install for EOS Capture and it told me the software was already installed so it didn't do anything. That stinks. So I exited the install and uninstalled EOS Capture, went back and loaded the CD and tried to install it again. So it managed to install some files, I rebooted my computer (no small task as it take 5 minutes to go through everything). Went back to the Start menu to EOS Capture and crap, same two items: Readme and Uninstall. That stinks. Obviously I was doing something wrong. I read in the Software Guide (I was getting desperate) that the camera needed to be attached and switched to Communication: PC Connect. Aah...was this my problem? Didn't make much sense to me so I repeated my steps and ended up with the same result. At this point I was ready to call it quits.
I uninstalled EOS Capture again, went back to the Install CD and decided to install ZoomBrowserEX 5.5, what the heck, this was the only utility I didn't have and I figured someone may be assuming I need this to get the EOS Capture to work. This was a big program. After rebooting my computer (third time) I went looking for EOS Capture and no luck. So in desperation I fired off ZoomBrowser and saw that it had an Acquire and Camera Settings "task" so I started clicking in there, finding a Remote Capture feature. I was able to change the camera settings and click the shutter all from this little dialog box. How cool is that? But wait, where were the images going. I set the location of the captured files to a folder but nothing was coming in. Nothing was being written to the memory card. That stinks.
I went back to the download page and decided to get the updated version of ZoomBrowser. The version I had was 5.5, and the new one was 6.0.1c. So I did the download, went through the install and fired up the new version. Under the Acquire & Camera Settings, I selected Connect to Camera and received this new message:
WTF!! Ok, I was getting quite upset with this whole ordeal. Out of complete desperation I went to grab the EOS Utility again. Under the description for the file it confirmed that this was the program I should be using for remote capture. I downloaded the install, fired it off and it got safely through, no message telling me a previous version was not installed. I rebooted one more time, and kept my fingers crossed (not really...I knew this would work!). After clicking on the shortcut I was able to see again the Remote dialog box, and able to set the images to go directly to DPP (Canon's RAW file utility). So I was able from the laptop to change aperture, ISO, click the shutter, and see the image appear in DPP for immediate review. How COOL is that? Redemption at last.
BTW, EOS Capture never did intall correctly. Which goes to show how utterly sick, cruel, sadistic, and idiotic all of this is on us poor techno-phobes, who only want to get something simple to work.
PC and 5D, together at last!