Can a Nikon D3000 shoot continuously while tethered to a PC?
Asked 11/7/2010
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I know the Nikon D3000 can shoot at up to 3 fps in Continuous mode. If the camera is tethered to a computer and saving images directly to the PC, can it still maintain that burst rate, or does tethering slow continuous shooting down?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
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Shooting tethered seems to work very similarly to shooting with an SD card: the camera stores pictures in its internal buffer before transferring them to PC, and therefore can shoot as fast as the buffer can handle. (At least, I haven't noticed any slowness.)
However, don't expect to be able to shoot RAW photos indefinitely at 3 frames per second: your USB connection just won't keep up. I just did a little test with Aperture's tethering, and found that I can sustain a speed of roughly 1 frame per second shooting RAW.
Originally by user378. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user378
15y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes, it can still shoot in Continuous mode while tethered, but the sustained speed is limited by the camera buffer and the USB transfer rate. In practice, tethered shooting behaves much like shooting to an SD card at first: the camera captures frames into its internal buffer, so short bursts can still be taken at the camera’s normal burst speed. However, once the buffer fills, transfer speed becomes the bottleneck. For RAW files, you should not expect to maintain 3 fps indefinitely over USB; a more realistic sustained rate is around 1 fps. So: short bursts may reach the normal continuous rate, but long tethered bursts will slow down noticeably, especially in RAW.
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