Eye-fi

Anyone ever heard of this?

http://www.eye.fi/overview/how-it-works/

If I didnt have a Rebel Xti (which uses a CF) id probably be all over this!

 

I read an article about this (or similar technology) where someone had their camera stolen but they were cought because whenever the camera found wireless internet it was sending all the pictures they took back to the camera owners computer.

 

Oh then this might be a good gift for my dad! He lost his other camera at WDW because he left it in a bathroom. When he went back to get it, it was gone!
Now on the other hand my sister left her park ticket I think in one of those things that holds toilet seat covers (she doesnt carry a wallet). Guess what she forgot it. Two days later she went in and it was still there! She has the best luck, but what does that say about Disney cleaning! LOL

 

Yes! I saw this on Good Morning, America, I think. Very good idea but I don't know anyone personally who uses it. Wondering about reliability, etc.

 

Me id have no use for this but can see the appeal of it for others

 

I knew it would only be a matter of time before they came out with this...Gdad, I love that the person was caught. That's justice.

I'm not sure if I would want this feature for myself or not.

 

I'm using SD cards and am horrible at getting pictures on my computer I keep putting it off I don't know why. I think this is interesting but like a lot of things I think it would lose its novelty factor after a little while and become not that useful. I find I do that with a lot of technology. I think hey a cool web application sign up for it and never use it again (pownce, otherinbox, there are countless examples).

 

But isn't that the draw for this type of technology? It just does it for you...no remembering to use it. You just sit down and look at your pictures already taken from the card.

I can see a couple good advantages. 1) convenience, of course and 2) an extra step of protection for your photos. It removes them as soon as you get home (or near a hotspot/free wi-fi). I was on vacation once and had my card fail. Luckily I had brought my USB card reader and had removed the pics each day otherwise I would have lost EVERYTHING in the "card crash". (Luckily, I was able to recover the files with a recovery program but you can't always count on that.) It would be nice to just walk in, put your camera down and POOF! all done for you...especially on vacation.

 

I kind of dismissed this as a gimmick. I don't quite remember all the info that I looked up on it before, but I seem to recall that it was slow and also there were issues about power usage. Also it kind of ties you to the one card, I mean if you shoot more than 2 gigabytes while you're away from wireless access you have to use another card, and that card can't be uploaded.

I was also unhappy at the way it was designed around sending everything to their own server, and then it was sent back to you (I must admit that it looks like they now support that, but I'm still not certain that it's really that direct). Some may see that as a plus, and of course it's a better solution if you're away from home and are counting on uploading from a remote wireless point.

Also there was the unavoidable fact that (perhaps aside from the D90, I hadn't heard about that) you can't really control it at all from your camera. You just have to trust that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing. This is just a guess, I haven't read up on it, but I'd expect that it could be a problem if you want to use either a pay to use wireless access point, or even some free points that require you to click on a web page to accept the terms of use first. So I question how many remote access points you could use. The expensive version (not that much more, but still the priciest option) says it includes hotspot access, which is interesting, but still problematic. I mean IF you happen to have access to the particular hotspot brand they support, Wayport (they say McDonalds uses them, along with a bunch of other places), then you can use it, but if you end up at a different branded place then you could be out of luck. And at that the hotspot access seems to only be good for one year, I don't know how much they'd charge for additional service.
I should add that that expensive version appears to have an option to send you an SMS or email or when it starts and finishes an upload, so you can get some degree of feedback.


I want to stress the free wifi thing. I can't be sure what would happen, but I know that some (many if not most) free wireless access points make you click on a start page that contains terms of service and such, basically you have to promise not to do bad things on their network. I have no idea how this card would react to one of those. If it was cleverly coded it could be designed to automatically click through those pages, but I don't know if it was that cleverly coded. And as for Disney resorts, an initial google search suggests that Disney uses a different provider, so you could be out of luck trying to use this thing in Disney World. Even if you payed for it, I mean, you'd have no way to enter the user info that I assume you'd need to enter to use the account you've just payed for. Unless you stayed at some of the hotels located near Downtown Disney, it appears that at least the Wyndham and the Doubletree have Wayport. Or if you could find a rogue open AP somewhere on site.


Having said that, I admit that it could be really cool if you were to set it up to send pictures from the road. So long as you could accept all of your pictures showing up unedited, it could be neat to be able to show your friends the things you're experiencing on a daily basis during a trip.

The geotagging support is intriguing as well. It's the type that works by triangulating your position via wireless access points, which means it would probably be useful enough in cities or other populated areas, I've tested it at my house which is in a wireless intensive suburb and it's accurate enough to be useful, but not pinpoint accurate. But in the middle of, say, a Disney park, it may not be so useful. I mean even if they have a number of wireless APs within the park system they still may not be mapped, the company that provides the mapping gets their data by surveying from cars. Unless they made a special case for Disney World and surveyed the parks by foot they probably don't have data for it. It goes without saying that there'd be no data if you were off the beaten path. I mean it's surprising how ubiquitous wireless networking has become, I've watched it expand through my neighborhood throughout the years, but it's almost entirely a short range system and even in a densely populated area you could stray beyond the range of any sites by heading into an open space like a park.

 

Addendum: rather than edit my already long post I want to add one more thing here.

CF only people rejoice, you have an option. CF to SD adapters exist and apparently work (although I found one report of trouble others reported success), allowing you to use the SD card in your CF only dSLR.

There are at least three caveats, however. First and foremost, no RAW support.

Secondly I've found reports of range issues when using an adapter. I mean many complain about limited range even when using it with a camera meant to use SD cards, but apparently when you stick it inside an adapter that is then inside a camera the range is further degraded. In any case, I doubt they could have stuck much of a decent antenna into that little SD card package. I mean I had an SD wireless adapter for a pocket PC, but it had a larger antenna module that projected out of the top, it was meant to stick out of the slot.

Some have reported that they have problems using this card in a dSLR with an adapter because the dSLRs power down the card when it's not being used. I have no idea how widespread this issue is, but it would be a bit of a rude shock to find out that your camera is only able to transfer pictures wirelessly if you're actively shooting pictures so that the camera has the power to the card on.

Also to add to my concerns that it only sends files to their server and then back to you, that may even be the case with the cheap home version that supposedly sends the files straight to your computer. I found an annoyed customer who couldn't use it, at all, because he lived in the Phillipines and apparently his ISP used some sort of proxy that the Eye-fi software wasn't compatible with. The proxy would be irrelevant if it downloaded straight to PC, the Internet itself would be irrelevant to such a process. It's not that there's any real problem with that method IF it works, but it seems clumsy to me, and whats more I don't trust it. There's no need to make it that clumsy, it's costing them money, making their servers do more work. Why are they doing it that way? And whats more, what happens if their company goes out of business? The hardware could become useless if their server support evaporates.


And one final note, I think this thing is a lot clunkier than it may initially seem. It looks like you have to maintain a list of wireless access points that you want it to use. Which means that if you're going on vacation and are counting on finding a free access point to use you'd have to find it, bring a laptop to find out the details and to change the settings on the card, and then upload from the card. If you have to bring a laptop along why bother with the card in the first place?

Unless, that is, you get the more expensive Explore version, apparently it has an open wifi option that would let it connect to any open access point along with it's other hotspot functions.


I still think it's a neat idea, but I think it's got too many problems. The fact that you have to shell out an extra $30 just to be able to tell it to connect to any open AP that it can find just ticks me off. The clunky system of always uploading to their server and then back to your computer, even if you just want to transfer to your computer (not that I'd ever have a need for that, a USB transfer adapter will be faster and frankly more convenient) also annoys me.

And get this, it looks like it doesn't delete the files it's uploaded. So if you're counting on this as a way to offload pictures from a card to free up space then you might want the Explore version for its SMS or email notifications so you can know for sure that it's uploaded the files before you go and manually delete them.