About 6 months ago I purchased my first camera, PANI FZ1000. One of the features being remotely control through an Android/Panasonic Image App on either a smartphone or tablet, of which I had neither. However, this appealed to me; thought I could set the camera on a tripod aligned to a feeder and every so often check the tablet from my easy-chair to view the activity for potential pictures.
Did the research for the ideal tablet with this in mind; more and bigger is always better, saves money from upgrades.
This was about 4 months ago, what I came up with was exactly what Colin purchased and configured; Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Tab 3.
The tablet ran between $400-$500, used or refurbished around $200.
I had no use for a tablet other than my desire to remotely control my camera every so often. So I sat on this for a while ultimately deciding to put it out of my head.
Christmas rolls around and my neighbor gives me a cheap ( $30 ) tablet as a gift; IRULU eXpro 7 inch 8G with an microSD card slot.
Shortly after purchasing my PANI she went out and bought an FZ1000 for herself. We talked about the remote control feature, she liked the idea, I told her it was an expense I didn't needed to incur, she gifted the tablet and asked me to figure it out.
Here's what I found:
The IRULU is a 7 inch screen, Colin's Galaxy is a 10 screen. Bigger is better. They're both google KitKat Androids. They do the regular tablet stuff; camera, email, social media access, wifi, Bluetooth, and so on.
The IRULU is an 8 gig tablet with a microSD slot for external memory.
How it works with IRULU; if you loaded 2 gigs of apps you then have 6 gigs of memory. It takes memory to access the web so it will take that additional memory from the 6 gigs. So at any given time your memory is shrinking. Therefore, at some point this tablet slows to a crawl as the available memory shrinks based upon what's loaded e.g. apps, photos, movies, and such. As well as what apps are running at any given time, experienced by; slow loading web pages, slow touch screen response and freezing but not locking up, for a short period of time.
Stands alone, the IRULU is a slow tablet, in regards to accessing the web for anything. This may have to do with the router speed and not the processor. I don't know, I did not experiment with that. The IRULU is a 1.5G Quad Core compared to the 1.6G Galaxy. Just for reference, 4K video requires a 3.5G processor with an ideal 4G of video memory.
I won't critique my camera and app but loading and running Image App was no problem.
The WiFi range was okay, I also believe it to be a product of the router. However, I was disappointed with the range between the camera WiFi and tablet. That maybe a product of the camera.
The transfer of photos or files is simple; WiFi, load a microSD card, USB, all standard stuff.
The photo images are okay to really nice based upon the photo itself and the angel of viewing the screen. There's some post processing features; color, contrast, cropping. I'm sure the discerning eye will have issues with certain colors, I'm not that far gone.
You won't be able to view RAW photos without a RAW image viewing app. There's plenty out there, you'll need to review and select one to your liking.
Any experiences / recommendations would be appreciated....onus on reasonable price.
Thanks
John
I got a little winded justifying the means.
If it's a daily user you want, on a reasonable price, I'd go with Colin's suggestion. Try to hunt down something acceptable between $200-$500 with lots of memory.
If you're going to use it once every few months, show photos, surf Birdforum while you're in a motel room on a bird outing.....then maybe you could get by with a $30 tablet.
Good Luck my friend.
