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You may have heard of this:
The Eye-Fi card:
a 2gig SD card with Wi-Fi and can upload from any hotspot, to, at last count, 20 different sharing and printing services as diverse as Wal-Mart, Facebook, and Shutterfly.
You shoot, it uploads automatically, without the card ever leaving the camera.
Very cool.
The thing we had an issue with was that you couldn’t pick and choose which images were uploaded. All or nothing at all. So if you were shooting an event and some photos were never meant to be shared, you know which pics I’m talking about, they would all be uploaded. There was protection though: you can have the images protected/closed/not published till you get to your computer and choose the ones to become public or get printed.

hmmmm..so you STILL had to get to your computer to select your images. Yes, you didn’t have to put your card into a reader. Not much of a time saver.

But now they are uploading automatically to your iPhoto. A site where you always keep photographs private till you adjust the images. Somehow that makes better sense. You weren’t going public with that material anyway. Or not till you dealt with them.

When we’re out snapping, just come home, put the camera down, grab cold beverage and the photos upload to iPhoto. Sweet!

And I’ll bet if you used a a CF card adapter, you could shoot and have it auto upload to your computer for a poor mans wireless shoot! Time for a road test!

We gave it a shot in a Nikon D200 with a CF adapter for the SD card. It was a bit slower than we hoped for the upload ;about 10 minutes for the first image, had to be close to the computer ( about 10 ft in our test) and we even made it a more manageable size (approx. 5 mgs.). No RAW though.

Thanks to our friends at Photojojo for the tip and the CF adapter recco.

Now the original idea was to make a poor mans wireless upload system to a computer to view-as-you-shoot with a full-on DSLR using CF. Good thought, mixed results. Too slow to be useful. It worked, but not as expected. By the time the photo was uploaded, it was of no use for the review purpose. Had to give it a shot.

Tethering is still the deal or a wireless transmitter made for the job. They work everytime, I’ve used it. So…The Eye-fi goes back into the point-and-shoot WHERE IT DOES A GREAT JOB!

It still does everything it says it will: No brainer for the casual user that never seems to download their pix from their point-and-shoots. Just get near a wi-fi hotspots and Bada-bing, the snaps are uploaded to any of 20 photosharing or printing sites.
Or your iPhoto if you are near your computer.Dig that part.

Nikon’s new D60 is very Eye-fi friendly, optimized for it’s use, and those that use the Eye-fi SD card in conjunction with that camera can upload to Nikon’s own My Picturetown with 2 gb of free storage. Wait, that’s how big the card is.Hmmmm

This is just the first round of this technology. Lexar just started to put their name on the SD card by Eye-Fi.

You’ll be seeing much more wireless everything in your cameras coming soon. Let’s see how quick we start writing about the history of the future. On a laptop with wi-fi.

By the way..this Eye-fi currently only works in the USA. Too many different standards they told me, to put it out globally at this.

At the end of the day, it’s a smart piece of technology , but I’m not sure that the time savings equals the high price of a 2gb. SD card. Yet. There will be more to come from these people, and we’ll keep you posted.

Cheers!
Damon

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Photo News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.