Meta-35 for extracting digital info from camera

[nsouto]

Just received my Meta35. Heard about it in DPReview and ordered one last month.
Tried it out last night and am happy to say it works fantastic.
Makes it sooo easy to embed exif info about the image into the scanned image files, there is just no comparison with anything else!
In a nutshell, you get a left panel with the info extracted from the camera - in my case F6 and F100 - and on the right panel you add the directory where the corresponding scanned files are, and then you match sequentially the entries in the camera data with each image.
Press a button at the end and the scanned files are modified to add the EXIF info.
Yup, that easy!

For those who don't know what I'm talking about:
1- Some film cameras (F5, F90, F100, F6, EOS1V and some Minoltas) have a memory for exif-like info on each shot.
2- For Nikon, the only way to extract this was with the MV-1 Data Reader which basically just dumps the data into a memory card as text files and then it's up to you to laboriously match each entry in these files to each scanned file - boring, repetitive, error prone.

Promote Systems came out with this Meta35 gizmo that plugs into a usb port and talks to the cameras live from the PC as well as the you-beaut program I mentioned above to match the info to each image.

Got mine from Dead Link Removed
Of course: no affiliation, no financial interest.
Just a very happy customer.
Highly recommended.

 

[MartinCrabtree]

My problem with it is the computers I have aren't up to snuff for it. So to use it will cost me a lot of money...............that I don't have right now.

 

[nsouto]

I run mine on Win7 64-bit, but I believe it'll run on anything upwards of Win2000/XP.
And it comes with one of the easiest installations I've ever seen: a little USB key is all.
Plug it in, run the program inside and away it goes.
No CD, just the USB key. Which has more capacity than a standard CD anyway!

 

[OzJohn]

I run mine on Win7 64-bit, but I believe it'll run on anything upwards of Win2000/XP.
And it comes with one of the easiest installations I've ever seen: a little USB key is all.
Plug it in, run the program inside and away it goes.
No CD, just the USB key. Which has more capacity than a standard CD anyway!

While I own two of the Nikons mentioned and have always been aware that they gathered this info, I was never interested enough to extract it - and other than dates, I rarely look at any of the vast metadata that digital cameras produce either. Do I recall correctly that one recommended method of extraction for the Nikons was to use a particular, now long-gone, personal organizer - perhaps Panasonic? OzJohn

 

[nsouto]

Not sure about that Panasonic at all.

The Nikon gizmo is the MV-1 Data Reader.
It costs heaps in b&H and other few online places.
I've burned one of them and had to buy another...

The Meta-35 costs half what the MV-1 does and so far it does a much better job with its inbuilt software.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Nero photosnap viewer has a similar utility built in but seems to have little editing ability. The Canon printer program has a utility to print some info when making proof sheets and then leaves room for more info.

PE