Eye-Fi

[Voltron]

Has anyone used these things successfully? If you have any thoughts or experiences, post them up. Planning to get one for my wife's new camera.

[jvlgato]

Al, I bought one for my wife's camera because I was tired of having to help her upload pics into her computer. It's been mostly good. The concept is great, all your pics upload to your computer then to your photo web service automatically when you're within wifi range. It was easy to set up, seems to work well, with only an occasional inability to find the wifi signal. Her biggest problem has been that it has been eating up the battery in her camera. Haven't researched a cure yet, but have encouraged her to be sure to turn off the camera at night rather than leaving it on standby. I'm guessing the card keeps polling for a wifi signal when the camera is left on? She hasn't complained about it for a few weeks now, so maybe that did it? I'll ask her how it's been when I see her.

[jvlgato]

One other feature I love in our model is that it will delete old photos after confirming an upload, to automatically free up space in the card!

[Voltron]

Thanks John. And Reks, I don't think that the action photography issue will be a big one. This is a p-n-s for her purse so she can take pics of the kids or dog or food/drinks and upload them easily to FB or iPhoto or whatever. It just seems like a cool capability that I wanted to check out.

[Mister X]

After a few months I can't imagine going back to not using one again.

i believe the Eye-Fi cards are fairly slow, so i don't think that they are a good choice for action photography.

With my LX3 the first image takes about 6 seconds, if I don't turn it back off every picture after that takes about 2 seconds.

So yeah.. a little slow but definitely worth not having to mess with cables and or removing the card from the camera.

[luvdunhill]

With my LX3 the first image takes about 6 seconds, if I don't turn it back off every picture after that takes about 2 seconds.

So yeah.. a little slow but definitely worth not having to mess with cables and or removing the card from the camera.

I think Reks is referring to a different "slow", as in write speed.

[jvlgato]

Correction, apparently pics are uploaded to the Eye Fi site first, then downloaded to your computer and/or your preferred photo web site. Makes sense. Anne has never complained about the speed of the card, but then she doesn't do a lot of action shots. I'd think battery life might be the bigger issue. But then I still have a slow DSL line, so it takes forever to upload.

[Voltron]

I think Reks is referring to a different "slow", as in write speed.

And I read X to say that the first pic takes 6 seconds to write and then the rest take 2 seconds to write, but those seem like very long times and maybe he was referring to upload time.

[Mister X]

Yeah, that's upload time.

Read write speeds from the computer I have in front of me ATM are:

(eye-fi card)

(POS sandisk SDHC card)

[jinp6301]

How to Take Wireless Photos With Your DSLR and iOS Device

would be pretty useful with an ipad

[Edwood]

LTTP, but I've been using an Eye-Fi X2 Pro for awhile.

I'll bring it to MOAII, and you can check it out for yourself, Al, if you're still looking to get one and haven't already.

It's pretty decent speed. Without an N speed router, uploading RAW's is painfully slow. But the really neat part is being able to upload directly to Facebook, etc. You can set it to only upload images you "protect" which then flags it to upload.

Some digicam's firmware recognize the Eye-Fi, like my Sony NEX-5, and shows connection and transfer status. Others don't, but will still work, you just have to guess when it's done transferring.

I got the X2 Pro version for it's ability to work with Ad Hoc connections, namely, I can upload stuff directly to my phone via it's wifi hotspot app.

-Ed

[episiarch]

Only just now noticed this thread. Huge Eye-Fi fan here. I have the X2 Pro in the D90, and lesser cards in all the other cameras.

Upload speed hasn't been brilliant (we shoot JPEG+RAW, excuse me, +NEF), but that's OK with me. What I really care about is the automation - once photos are taken, they'll wind up in our master iPhoto library at some point, and they'll wind up on our SmugMug sharing site (in a "to-be-reviewed" folder where Kristiana can organize them and decide what to publish to the friends and family), without any further fiddling on our part aside from making sure the camera gets turned on when we get home.

I also love the geotagging. When it works, it works well. When it doesn't work, it doesn't work in predictable places (like in the middle of Windsor Great Park with no wi-fi around). It's very nice not to have to add locations by hand.

Dislikes:

- for practical purposes there is no integration with Aperture. iPhoto integration is quite good, so I use that and then manually slurp stuff from iPhoto to Aperture from time to time. It's fairly lousy, but not quite lousy enough for me to dive in and figure out how to automate it.

- seems to be fairly dumb about knowing when to give up on finding a hotspot. The D90 has a stay-awake-until-EyeFi-is-finished setting, and the Eye-Fi's reluctance to give up and go to sleep means the D90 stays awake also, a battery drain. (In fairness it's possible this has been fixed in firmware at some point but we're so paranoid about it now that we always manually shut off the D90-stay-awake feature when we go away overnight, so we wouldn't notice if this were fixed.)

Edited January 20, 2011 by episiarch

[Jabreal53hcase]

Well, I guess this is going to be working quite well as a matter of fact, this technology has just emerge to the surface and I think there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it. But new technology isn’t something that you guys want to get in the first place; they will need some people to use it and to give them feedback to let them know how their products are doing actually. I recommend you to get it after some time. But I don’t think there would be any problem wrong with it.

[Fitz]

wat.

[Edwood]