5G, a blessing for photographers?

Saturday 14 March 2020, 17:17 by Huub Keulers | 4,186 views | 14 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

5G, no, it has nothing to do with the number of Gs that Max Verstappen experiences in his Formula 1 car. We are talking about the fifth generation of mobile wireless technology.

5G is also being rolled out in the Netherlands this year and promises lightning-fast Wi-Fi speeds that will rival some of the fastest wired network connections.

This makes me enthusiastic on the one hand because it could significantly change the way photographers work. But on the other hand, we still do not really know how safe radiation from a 5G network is for people and nature.

5G speeds

A 5G signal is characterised by its extremely high speed. However, it is not just faster, it can also send more data, is more reliable and provides much longer battery life for your mobile phone.

For example, tractors could drive themselves, crops could be fitted with sensors and continuously checked for diseases, and doctors could assess a patient in an ambulance remotely. Finally, network latency is many times lower because of the greater bandwidth used by 5G technology.

The possible speeds of 5G are so high that it could become a serious replacement for 'fixed internet'. This would mean that fibre, cable and DSL connections could become redundant.
5G could potentially reach speeds of 1.25 Gbit per second.

Many times faster than 4G, then. Although the speeds are certainly exciting and rival those of a reasonably fast home or business internet connection, another major aspect of 5G is its capacity.

While 4G can support 100,000 devices per square kilometre, 5G can support up to 1,000,000 devices, reducing congestion on the network.

5G and safety

5G will use existing and new masts. There will probably also be small antennas. A 5G network uses a new way of transmitting, employing a so-called two-dimensional antenna that can track users 'horizontally and vertically'.

However, because the highest frequencies required have a short range, many antennas will be needed that emit a relatively strong radio signal. This has led to discussions about the possible health effects of this network.

All 5G antennas must comply with international exposure limits for electromagnetic radiation. Small 5G antennas that are nearby must also meet these safety requirements.

Why is all this so exciting for photographers

OK, so that is all wonderful: our mobile phones will become considerably faster over the next few years. Why am I so enthusiastic about this when it comes to work or hobbies? Well, when 5G becomes a little more widespread and stable, we will have free access to speeds capable of transferring large amounts of files in real time.

Backing up files is always a necessary 'evil' for photographers. At least two local copies and one copy in the cloud are the standard method, but moving all that data to the cloud naturally takes a lot of bandwidth and often patience.

Let's say, for example, that a sports or wedding photographer comes home with 4,000 images, which is a fairly standard number. Normally compressed raw files on my Canon 1Dx are about 24 MB each. So 4,000 photos comes to 96 GB.

At the moment, with a fairly standard broadband connection in the Netherlands, it takes around 20 hours to back up those 4,000 RAW images over an average Wi-Fi connection.

That is not particularly fast, but it is not terrible to back up the number of images from a sports assignment or wedding: switch on the backup when you get home after the shoot and it will be ready the following evening. With 5G, however, the backup mentioned above would be reduced to a fraction of this time.

This means that it is quite possible that photographers will soon be able to keep their 5G phone in their pocket, with their camera connected to it wirelessly, and back up photos as they are taken.

Within seconds of pressing the shutter button, the unedited file is already in the cloud. The logistics of juggling external hard drives between breaks in a sports match to make a local backup have disappeared.

Files are simply backed up as they are created. It could also eliminate the frustrating stories we hear about photographers somehow losing their files before getting home to back them up.

It could even make a kind of remote tethering possible. Have you ever waited for Lightroom to create 1:1 previews for 4,000 images? It is far from a fast process.

But with this kind of real-time uploading, you could easily send the images to a Dropbox folder, for example, from where Lightroom would automatically import them and generate previews while you are still at the event. By the time you get home, the images would be ready to be selected and edited.

This could also be a major blessing for news organisations and photojournalists, who often need to upload images as quickly as possible, with every second feeling like an eternity.

Everything a photojournalist photographs on location could be sent immediately to the press agency, without using a wired network at the location.

Potential problems

Although all these scenarios sound fantastic, they are of course a little far-fetched at the moment, because there are many problems and potential obstacles to consider first. One of the frequencies needed for a faster 5G network, 3.5 GHz, is also still being used by the military.

This frequency is expected to become available sometime in 2021-2022. From that point on, everyone could in principle use the high internet speed.

Conclusion

We probably do not yet have the infrastructure to make these scenarios possible for a wide range of photographers, and there are other problems that also need to be addressed.

But the potential for 5G to make photography more efficient, simplify workflows on the move and protect data better is there, and that in itself is good news.

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