Add Wi-Fi to any Camera with Eye-Fi SD

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://photojojo.com/content/buy-this/wifi-camera-memory-card/' target='_blank'>http://photojojo.com/content/buy-this/wifi-camera-memory-card/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Before we even start to tell you what this thing is, we have to tell you: it’s amazing, we LOVE it, and it makes us feel like we’re living in the future... the Eye-Fi Wireless memory card adds Wi-Fi to any camera that uses SD memory. It’s orange. It looks like a normal SD camera memory card. It holds 2 GB of photos. And it wirelessly uploads your photos to your computer and to Flickr or one of 16 other photo sharing sites. We always dreamed that someday, we’d merely turn on our cameras and all our photos would be invisibly downloaded to our computer and uploaded for our friends to see. It’s someday."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/eyefi-feature.jpg" /><br /><br />Sweet! For just $99, you can add Wi-Fi to your camera. It is unfortunate that they only sell this in SD form and not CF, otherwise I'd be buying one right now for my 10D. But it looks like they are working on an adapter for those of us that want CF. I also think that this is a great time to get such a device out since camera manufacturers are considering more and more about adding Wi-Fi capabilities but this feature is not universally available yet so it could have filled the need now very well.

[Jeremy Charette]

This. Is. Awesome.

I am going to buy one.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

DPReview has a review on it.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Very cool indeed. I was doing a tethered portrait shoot a few days ago and the usb cable kept falling out of the camera, so wireless would have been good. However the 300K/s is rather limiting, as files would not get to the laptop fast enough. Lets hope that the CF version of this increases the throughput. If it does, I'm getting one. :-)

[ploeg]

So far, the Eye-Fi card performs probably about as well as you would expect it to perform. Connections between the card and my WPA Wi-Fi network are spotty. The setup program tests the connection between your card and the Wi-Fi network before it will let you finish. The first three tries from five feet away from the router were unsuccessful, but the fourth time was a charm. When the card is in my Canon Elph SD1000 camera, the connection is off-and-on (download a third of a meg, rest, download another third, rest, etc.).

The card pretty much requires you to turn off any auto-shutoff timers. The card can transmit pictures only as long as the camera is supplying power to the card, which means that the camera has to be on for as long as it takes to send the pictures. It doesn't hurt anything if you turn off the camera before it finishes sending pictures, though, so no worries there.

The card works only in infrastructure mode (no ad-hoc connections), and the card does not support wireless hotspots that require you to enter a password on a web page. So plan on using your own router (or on setting up the card to use a friend's router).

I have not yet been able to get any photos to dotphoto.com through the Eye-Fi service. I plan to try some other services later this week, but it seems like this feature is not quite ready for prime time.

A card like this would be overkill for most people. It sounds like a neat idea, but in most cases it would be faster and easier to use a card reader instead. One possible application would be if you wanted to take pictures at a party or gathering in a big room, and download them automatically to a printing station with a router, a computer, and a printer. You could take pictures at the gathering pretty much continuously, and return to the printing station every so often to queue another batch of photos without having to remove the card from your camera.

[ploeg]

I was able to post pictures to flickr, picasa, and dotphoto automatically using the Eye-Fi card. However, if you set the Eye-Fi card to upload pictures to these services, the upload speed becomes painfully slow. For my admittedly slow broadband connection, I did about 0.5 MB per minute (that is, a 2.5 MB photo took over four minutes to upload). The Eye-Fi service currently sends the full-size pictures to these photo services, which could burn up your available space in a hurry. Most users who want to upload pictures to these services would want to set the camera to VGA mode to speed the upload and stretch their online space.

If you set the Eye-Fi card to upload pictures directly to your computer without uploading to an online service, the upload speed is much more respectable, about 7 MB per minute.

The Eye-Fi Manager, which you use to configure your Eye-Fi card, is a web application. Unfortunately, you cannot change the Eye-Fi card settings using the Eye-Fi Manager unless you are connected to the Internet. Fortunately, you do not need to be connected to the Internet to upload pictures from your Eye-Fi card to your computer. All you need is a functional router or wireless access point. (As mentioned before, Eye-Fi does not support ad-hoc connections, so you must have an access point to complete the connection between the Eye-Fi and your computer.)

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Thanks for the write-up, pleog! Good to see some real-world impressions on this product.

No ad-hoc, limited modes of transmission, and somewhat slow speeds make this a bit of a turn-off. Seems like a bit of a W?BIC item to me.