Flutterby™! : Eye-Fi 2007-12-27 17:07:53.126229+00

Eye-Fi

2007-12-27 17:07:53.126229+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Interesting: The Eye-Fi is a 2 ~~mega~~ gigabyte SD card with WiFi capabilities that automatically uploads. Review of the Eye-Fi here.

I have thought about getting one of those, but I would need to wait until they have one in 8+ gigs. My G9 is 12 megapixels and when I shoot in raw a 2 gig card fills up pretty quickly. Also, once I'm back home and in range of my wifi router its only a couple of seconds to plug the USB cable into the camera.

I think the real benefit of these cards are for folks who shoot in a studio and can have instant PC access to the images, or perhaps photojournalists who have a laptop in a backpack - or want to beam images to friends in the crowd for when the cops take your camera from you.

Knock Knock. [creak] Hi Officer. Uhm.. Oh, gosh, what am I being arrested for? I posted pictures of WHAT to Flickr? Uh.. I didn't mean to.. uh..

His main complaint is the slow write speed when shooting RAW+JPEG. That seems to confuse the card (he's using a canon DSLR - don't remember the model - with a SD->CF adapter) and lead to delays as the card looks at the CRW file and then decides it doesn't know what to do with it. He very quickly fills the buffer on the camera, and has lost a few shots because the card wasn't ready for more pictures.

The other complaint is that there's no good way to tell, from the camera, if the card is done yet or not. We talked about this, and what would be nice would be that if picture 0 were always a jpeg that the camera could display, showing a quick status, that would completely rock.

My take is that the updates they need to deal with the CRW problem and the lack of status are fairly obvious 2.0 features, so I'm waiting a bit before buying one. Maybe there'll be an update. But in general, this is a pretty ding-dang cool piece of engineering.