Eye-Fi Pro 4 GB SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-4PC
by Eye-Fi
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Eye-Fi Pro 4 GB SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-4PC
Customer Review: works very well, had to buy a second one
Summary: 5 Stars
Installation went exactly as expected on my windows xp pro system. The packaging is minimal and simple, as is the instruction book. The simplicity is deceptive as you must understand how your wifi network works if you choose to use the adhoc network setup.
Web registration is required to register the device even if it will be used with adhoc networking.
The range of this device is not as good as other wifi devices, I suspect that the antenna crammed inside the sd-slot within a camera reduces the effective range of a device like this. I found the card would detect networks but at the edges of the network footprint it would not transfer images. Battery drain is noticeably higher but the loss is offset by the time saved docking the camera.
Adhoc networking is useful, the instructions provided were sufficient for windows and intel managed wifi cards however I was using another brand. The camera was out of the useful range of the router so I setup the adhoc network on a secondary nic to get around this. When powering up the camera it takes 20-30 seconds to connect to the adhoc network.
Of my two cameras one has the ability to disable and modify power management/sleep settings, the other doesn't. Power management sleep will interrupt transfers. If your camera has options to disable power management I highly recommend it if you take a lot of high resolution pictures. The camera may sleep before the uploads are finished and wakeup/reconnect will take 30 seconds to restart once the camera is powered back up. Interruptions to the network connection, power and low signal really slow the transfers. The card will retry automatically and generally reconnects in a timely manner. Occasionally the card did not reconnect fast enough for my preference.
The data write is a bit slower than my better SDHC cards, saving movies takes considerably longer to close the files, as does taking bursts of multiple images for longer than 3-4 seconds at a time. This is not a big problem for 99% of what I do.
Geotagging is interesting when using the SkyJack database, it was surprising to find my photos located closely to the actual shot on google maps. I'm waiting for GPS geotagging or some hybrid combination of GPS and skyjack.
I use picasa to manage my albums, it monitors the folders where eye-fi saves the files so they are uploaded almost immediately to picasa after they are taken. A lot of features for a reasonable price. Very happy with it.
Customer Review: Using with Canon Rebel XT and Canon D10
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this EyeFi Pro (4GB) card last week from Amazon for 99 dollars.
Lets start with the packaging. The eyefi packaging approaches Apple levels of cool. They have done a really nice job of keeping things simple and elegant. I guess some bonus points to them for this, but really it's the function of the card that matters.
The eyefi pro is amazingly simple to setup. I did the setup on a Mac, they've done their work to make this seamless and not some 'second rate' support level for people using Macs. You can plug the card into your Mac or PC using the included USB adapter, or just plug it into another available adapter or built in slot. All the setup is done via a web page, and there is a little detector application that figures out when you've plugged in the card and launches the setup application.
After you've setup wifi networks, allowed the card to use hotspots (or not... but it's included in the pro), setup sharing to various web photo and video services, setup where you want pictures, video, and raw images to go on your Mac or PC, setup (or not Geo tagging) you can eject the card and use in your camera like a normal memory card.
You can setup the card to upload everything to sharing sites, or only what you 'lock or protect' on your camera. This makes it nice to edit what you post or do not post while taking pictures. The notification emails that uploads have started and completed are great. The thumbnail photos that are included are very nice touch.
So much more to talk about, but in the end it comes down to one simple thing. Using Eyefi takes all the annoyance out of moving pictures around, storing them, posting them. It didn't seem like it would be as great as it is. I'm quite impressed, and likely will get a few friends hooked on the idea of using a eyefi.
I've been using the card in our Canon D10 (waterproof) point and shoot camera. It works great in here. We've also used it in our Digital SLR, the Canon Rebel XT. This camera takes compact flash cards, so we ordered (also from amazon) a recommended SD/SDHC to compact flash adapter (the green one). It worked great, minus one initial glitch. The XT didn't like the card when we first put it in. We had to backup the program folders/files on the card and let the XT format the card. We then put the files/folders back on and the card works great in both cameras now.
Customer Review: Snapshots made easy!
Summary: 5 Stars
I became interested in Eye-Fi after finding someone I followed on Twitter used their cards. An interesting idea, I thought. When I bought my Canon XSi, I ordered one of these cards to go with it.
Set up is easy. The software installs off the card, or you can download it from the website. Once the software is installed, you can create an account on the Eye-Fi website to configure the card, where the photos will be sent, what networks to join, etc. Take the time to set up every network you're on semi regularly, as you can only do this while the card is connected to the computer. Many of the other settings you can do from the website, without the card.
Once configured, pictures start flying over the wireless network shortly after you take them. They can download to a folder of your hard drive, or to iPhoto, which works quite well. You can have separate destinations for JPEG and RAW files (I have my RAW files saved on a different partition than the JPEG files). You can also configure different photo sharing websites to upload to, including Flickr, Gallery 2, and many others.
The card has worked very well for me, and I love not having to use a USB cable to share a picture I just took. I'd recommend this card to anyone, however there are a few "gotchas" that I wish I knew about before hand:
- You can only share to one photo site at a time. With the current software, you can have multiple sites configured, but only one of them can be active at a time. Not a huge problem for me, but might be for some. There may be work-arounds that you can try.
- RAW and JPEG downloads can be in different locations, but not different computers. This wasn't a deal breaker for me, either, but it did hamper how I wanted things set up. I wanted my RAW files downloaded to a computer away from home for archival purposes. I've been able to work around this with some AppleScript, though.
All things considered, I love this card. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but it keeps up with the snapshots in my life as they happen. Things start appearing on Flickr minutes after they happen, and when I start up iPhoto, images start downloading and importing. If you're tired of the hassle needed to share pictures from your digital camera, get one of these! You won't regret it!
Customer Review: Technical Considerations
Summary: 4 Stars
The new technology advances which allow this chip to processes RAW files and no longer requires a router make this product very interesting; both issues were previously show-stoppers for me. While high on the cool list, it's not very high on my business priority list; every purchase decision is a business decision. My 4 star rating is based on what I believe this technology can provide both amateur and pro photographers.
Understand that these chips provide the ability for peer-to-peer communications with another Wi-Fi device, namely a computer. This is Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi data transfer is by it's very nature v-e-r-y s-l-o-w. If you want faster transfer rates you will have to shoot tethered, using copper wire to transfer data from camera to PC. Do not expect this technology to do more than it is capable of or you will be very disappointed. I would respectively argue in that case that the problem is not so much the product or technology as your expectations.
I would not advise attempting to use this technology as a main method to upload photographs to a PC under all circumstances, and I do fault the company for advertising it as a workflow replacement for card readers without acknowledging it won't work in extreme circumstances such as continuous shooting mode. I personally would -=NEVER=- want it to delete the files once uploaded as one reviewer suggested! What if something went wrong with the wireless transfer? This would only be a viable solution if the images were not important to me (which is pretty much never).
This tool would be extremely useful in situations such as when teaching classes and giving demos - take the image, have it upload while you're talking, and setup Adobe Lightroom to automatically pull it in and project on the wall for discussion purposes. It would work equally well in a studio or school setting (or whenever you're doing mass photography of a line of people) such as described by another poster who was shooting dance school kids. I assume the image capture rate is slow enough to allow reasonable data transfer. It's a nice replacement to tethered shooting in some situations. It is NOT a single solution for all things. Think before you buy.
Customer Review: For point and click cameras only
Summary: 3 Stars
Eye-fi cards (regardless of type) only work well so long as you do not have a camera requiring higher than average performance (non-DSLR).
As a concept, the Eye-fi camera cards are awesome. They do communicate over Wifi and tag photos with GPS data.
However, how well eye-fi cards do their work is a different matter.
Technically, I have owned two Eye-fi cards- the standard 2GB card and the 4GB "Pro" card. The problems I experienced by both cards have been the same. I primarily use a semi-pro K20d (14.6mp). When shooting rapidly, (for instance children photos or soccer matches), the card only works so long as the card has enough time to write all of the data on the card. Multiple images will corrupt themselves on the card. The result is a complete loss of all photos starting with the first in the series of rapid shots. I even used data recovery software to see if any of the data is recoverable with mixed results.
The only way to prevent this issue on an Eye-fi card is to snap shots slowly. This is not acceptable for taking action photography. Please note that this is obviously the reason why Eye-fi does not publish the memory class of their Eye-fi cards. I chose a more flexible option using a Sony GPS-CS3KA GPS Digital Imaging Accessory (White) because 1) it's cheaper and 2) the GPS functionality is not bound to the card.
On the flip side, if you own a relatively inexpensive point and click camera, this card works well. Point an click cameras will allow the data to be placed on the card without buffer issues. However, the size of the images captured might be a problem. 6-10mb images still take some time to transfer over wireless. This means you have to leave your camera on for some time until you opt to receive a "transfer complete" image from Eye-fi or you leave your camera "on" while you charge your camera. Personally, I still find eye-fi performance on eye-fi cards acceptable for point and shoot cameras.