Bluetooth -- Does it really work well,reliably and easily?

[MTHall720]

I'm mostly wondering if images can truly be transferred to a phone or laptop using Bluetooth? Thinking about Nikon cameras mostly. Anything thoughts are appreciated.

 

[D7K]

I use bluetooth to connect the D850 to snap bridge and it's Wi-Fi to transfer photographs to the phone, I always use the USB when downloading to laptop as it's usually a lot of shots inn RAW and it'd take an age with BT.

 

[PJM]

I use Bluetooth and WIFI to connect my D5600 to my iPad using Snapbridge. Slower than USB but it does work. I sometimes find the connection to be a bit tempermental, especially when trying to use the remote photography feature. It never quite works when I want it to. It could be something I'm not doing right. But for photo transfer it is pretty reasonable.

 

[NancyMoranG]

What is SnapBridge? I could look it up, but you all may explain it better to me.
Thanks.

 

[TCampbell]

A major feature of bluetooth is that is is a "low power" radio. But the trade-off is that "low power" means both short range and slow transfer speeds. The latest bluetooth technology can support a "burst" of up to 2Mbits/sec if the distance is very short (they have the ability to slow down the transfer speed in order to transfer over greater distances.)

Compare this to WiFi... 802.11ac which can achieve speeds of around 1.3Gbits/sec (650x faster) and you can probably appreciate how transfer a lot of big RAW files could take ages to complete. The downside of WiFi is that it drains more power.

 

[DarkShadow]

That has been my experience with SnapBridge as well, its flaky connection drove me nuts getting it to connect but when it did, it worked ok both remotely and transferring files to phone. however by the time to connection from blue tooth to SnapBridge to the camera if it even connects to begin with, i am already set up and shooting away with my reliable wired connection so gave up on it altogether put the camera back in airplane mode save on battery drain.

 

[baturn]

I gave up on Snapbridge when neither Nikon nor Apple could help me with it. When I want to see photos right away I use a card reader connected to my ipad.

 

[DarkShadow]

Its could be a really good app if Nikon could improve on it but found out why people where dismissing it. Safe to say low review scores is pretty accurate.

 

[Josh Birch]

If you have the chance try WiFi instead of Bluetooth, I've found that it's way more stable and not such a big power consumption difference