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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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Eye-Fi Pro 4 GB SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-4PC
Customer Review: Fantastic Idea! Expensive Junk.
Summary: 1 Stars
We bought this card for photographing items for an eBay store.
The short version:
* Would we buy one again? No. Not ever.
* Would we recommend it? No. Not ever.
What a really great idea. It is very handy to take a series of photographs, have them automatically and remotely copied to a PC to make sure everything will look great with the published pictures.
When it works. Our first card was D.O.A. and we had to wait for a replacement. Setup is painful as the card must be registered with Eye-Fi's Website before it can be used. This takes a few tries. Once the card is communicating with the local Wi-Fi, most of the time it works. Our experience has been: either photos are uploaded to the PC right away or not at all. The pictures can still be moved manually by inserting the card in a card reader, but good luck getting the pictures through Eye-Fi. It all seems to depend on the card's mood as we could not figure out any kind of pattern.
Updating the card's firmware turned out to be a huge mistake. The update process completed and said everything was okay, but the Eye-Fi Manager absolutely refuses to recognize the card at all. The PC sees it as a normal SD memory card, but not so with Eye-Fi's application software. We tried various combinations of card readers and formatting with no luck.
Which brings us to Eye-Fi's customer service. Eye-Fi seems determined to win a worst-service award at any cost. It took us five emails to explain that the card stopped working AFTER updating the firmware, and we are still not sure they could understand that. In the end, they said they would just send us another card reader, then did not.
As a side note, the employee dealing with Eye-Fi card issues has two graduate degrees in engineering and was an embedded systems software engineer in a previous career.
In short, the Eye-Fi card is simply not worth the aggravation. Wait until somebody else introduces as similar product that actually works.
Ted
TimeEclectic.com
Customer Review: Great idea, software needs work
Summary: 4 Stars
I knew about Eye-Fi since its appearance in 2005 but waited for RAW-file support. The idea is great - you set up your card once and forever forget about both storage and transfer problems. The software needs some work though. But it's getting done from the look of it.
There are 4 types of cards which essentially vary only in size. The rest is marketing and software options. Idea of selling the same stuff to different people for different amounts of money isn't new (hello, Microsoft). The more you pay, the more options you get: local storage, web storage, video, RAW-file support. It even looks like you can buy extra "services" for cheaper cards (didn't test this though).
The wi-fi part is rock-solid. It works via my private access point, via ad-hoc (with my notebook), via open access-points (SSL to own server, nothing to worry about here).
The RAW-file support is okay, but is currently limited to local computer storage, even though SmugMug supports RAW-file upload.
I had problems with unsupported browser (Google Chrome v3beta) - but I was warned. The local computer upload was unreliable, the PC-software crashed frequently. It was all fixed when I started the Eye-Fi Manager inside MSIE. However if your default browser is not supported you have to manually start Eye-Fi Manager in the supported one - no way to choose the browser in the Eye-Fi Manager. The browser isn't needed for proper operation - it's for configuration and status display.
Nikon D90 (and up, I assume) has a menu switch for Eye-Fi.
The card is unexpectedly slow. Test on a PC shows 2MiB/sec but inside my camera (D70s) it's more like 1MiB/sec.
Also, for paranoid types - the Eye-Fi Manager keeps two ports (one TCP, one UDP) open at all times.
UPDATE: Eye-Fi provides extremely helpful support. All my problems were addressed and fixed in interim releases of the Eye-Fi Manager software. I'm very happy with it.
Customer Review: Great product for the Price
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best accessories I've bought for my camera. I like my Eye-Fi Pro so much that I'm going to buy the new X2 Pro and give this card to my wife to use. I have used this card at family weddings to show my pictures in real time while I am shooting them. This gives family members instant feedback. I have also shot pictures outdoors went to Starbucks or McDonald's and turned on my camera. By the time I've finished my latte my photo's are uploaded to my Flickr account and my laptop for editing. This summer my wife and I went to Comic-Con in San Diego. As we were shooting photo's at the convention they were being uploaded. I received a text message when the upload started and stopped and all of our friends could see in almost real time what we were doing.
I love the fact that I now no longer have to take my computer with me to upload photo's to and the added step of then pushing the raw photo's to Flickr is also handled for me by the Eye-Fi software. In the upcoming weeks I will be shooting pictures during my families annual Halloween party, these photo's will be uploaded as soon as they are shot and people will be able to view them on my TV as I'll be photo streaming them during the party. I'll also be shooting an ATV training class for my EMS squad which will be made into a training presentation for the state EMS system. Before I get home these images will be waiting for me sitting in my editing software without me having to take my camera out of it's case. Couple this with the fact that I now don't have to take multiple memory cards with me when I shoot and the added cost of the Eye-Fi pays for itself. If you shoot in RAW image mode as I do, having the PRO card allows these photo's to be uploaded to your computer for you, when you want to automatically share images just switch to JPEG mode in your camera and your Picassa or Flickr account will get your photo's.
Customer Review: Eye-Fi Pro card
Summary: 4 Stars
I am happy with the card.
It took me a while to set up the ad-hoc connection, but in all honesty that was operator error. (one can not log into an ad-hoc network using a miss-typed network name and expect to get a connection...) Once I realized I was trying to connect to the wrong network, all went well. It is very cool to set you camera down, and see the images slide down the screen as they automatically transfer to you computer. I wish that Adobe bridge was aware of the card so I could edit the Meda-data as the images come in, but that is a minor issue.
I use this in a Nikon D80 and my one major disappointment with this card is that I am not able to use the card with out setting the meter to stay on for 30 minutes, thus hammering the battery life. My method of dealing with this is to set the custom setting no 28 Auto-Meter off to 30 min, only when I actually want to upload photos, and set it back to 4 sec when I am not transferring photos, otherwise the camera will just drain the battery much faster that than it should. I have not tried using the card in a different camera yet, so this issue may have been addressed on later model cameras.
The Geo-tagging works well when you are in an area that is covered by wireless networks that are known to the system, and adding your own network is fairly easy.
The auto upload to Flickr is nice. Just set it to only upload selected photos otherwise everything goes up, which is not an ideal situation, at least for me anyway.
All in all I am happy with the card, and I got it from amazon at a fair discount so all is well... :)
Customer Review: Works, but with exceptions.
Summary: 2 Stars
If you use a newer digital camera capable of 720p video you might want to wait for the Pro X2 card made by Eye-Fi. I purchased the Pro 4 GB version for my girlfriend's Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1. On Eye-Fi's website it lists this camera as being compatible with the Eye-Fi Pro 4 GB on both video and photo. The photo worked well, but the video would stall out after a few seconds saying "Card Too Slow". I wrote to Eye-Fi's customer support and got a ridiculous reply. They agreed that it appeared it was not fast enough for the Lumix 720p video and recommended I buy *another* memory card and swap it out when I wanted to use video!? Instead I promptly returned it to amazon and am waiting for the Pro X2 to be released later this month (Jan. 2010). I will update this review and review the Pro X2 once I get the new memory card. I would recommend going to Eye-Fi's forum and reading around if you're wanting to see if your camera's video is supported, as their compatibility chart is flawed. To do 720p or higher video you need a "Class 6" card or better, which the Pro X2 is. This one is slower, and I would not recommend it.
To be fair, I never got around to using the Wi-Fi capabilities of this card as it was imperative I return it quickly for a refund. I will do a thorough test and review of the Pro X2 once it arrives. I can only go by what I've read that the Wi-Fi networking capabilities are top-notch as I've read nothing but good things about Eye-Fi's Wi-Fi abilities here and elsewhere. Also, the photo write speeds were good for my girlfriend's camera. The only problem again was the video recording.