I've been playing with PC software for a long time but I sure didn't find it easy installing the drivers for the 990. At one time it asked me to find "data3.cab" (It's under nkview3/disk2). Maybe I missed something but the documentation for installing them seems to be nil.

Getting the photos onto the hard drive is a snap but again I didn't find it intuitive. (The answer is that after you get the drivers installed you go into Windows Explorer and the camera shows up as a device along with all of your hard drives, cds etc) It doesn't show up as a device on the old Windows 3.1 File Manager however which I prefer to use day to day.

But the images are really awesome on the screen - haven't printed any however.

-- Bill (this_old_house@pobox.com), May 13, 2000

Answers

Nikon software in general is pretty crappy, even their software upgrades for the 950 were causing new bug like green pictures! I just left my camera alone as too many people were complaining about the new firmware updates. I have to say that Nikon View shows up under "My Computer" on my Win98 machine and is very easy to use. It sucks but its easy. As far as the Windows 3.1 file manager compatibility, anything 3.1 based is hideously outdated, even the word "3.1" is awful. Nothing written back then is worth even talking about. ACD systems makes some good file viewers which are superior to anything Windows OS provides. I live by their program Image Fox which lets you view thumbnails as you open them into Photoshop without having to open the entire image.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), May 14, 2000.

I agree with Cris' assessment, Nikon's software for both the 950 and 990 is surprisingly poor. In fact, I've uninstalled the photo organizer/viewer, it was locking up my notebook (but not the desktop). There are some pretty good shareware viewers on the net, e.g., Irvan.com that's much better than Nikon's.

-- Ted Krohn (ted.krohn@fra.dot.gov), May 15, 2000.

Funny, now you mention it, my laptop locked up and continued to lock up, after I installed the software. I thought it might be a coincidence, but the problem seems to with with rundll32 and specifically with the Microsoft ipx driver on a Novell network. As I said, could be coincidence. I waited for this model partially for the USB support in Win98/NT

-- Alan Goldberg (alan.goldberg@inetnorth.com), May 19, 2000.