Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

Reviews: Storage

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Max Slowik
Beth
Eye-Fi
Jul. 30, 2008

Specifications

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Installation

The software installed quickly and, for the resource-minded, it's tiny. The packages are a couple of megs and use kilobytes of memory while chillin' in the system tray. The set-up process is about seven steps worth of following on-screen directions; more if you want your Eye-Fi to upload photos to Flickr or any of a bunch of other photo-sharing websites. None of these steps is more difficult than setting up, say, a Flickr account.

The interface runs in a browser window, and the application just sits in the corner, blinking when your computer receives a file. From the system tray, you can turn on or off the thumbnail previews of the photos as they're getting copied, and also update the software.

Theoretically, after this you don't need the card reader anymore. Well, if you're adding or changing its settings, the card needs to be in a reader, but I didn't have any problems just plugging it into the one built into my laptop.

In Use

So far so good. I installed the software hasslelessly. Then I shot a bunch of pictures, then... nothing. No transfer. Piss. Of course, I know why: my camera is set to saving photos in raw format, not .jpgs.

Currently there is no support for raw image files, or any non-.jpg file transfers.

So I cut my losses and shot .jpg, then ran into another snag: the thumbnail previews on my computer were all gray, with a compressed stripe of photo at the top of the little window. And it covers up an app in the corner, and there's no setting to move or resize it, so I disabled it. (This may be because I'm rollin' Vista, but still.)

Then: Flickr pollution. It seems cool, a great idea, but I want to actually edit my photos before I share them, and it's a whole lot easier to do this on my computer rather than online, and after the fact. This option: disabled.

But there's still promise here. I'd love to shoot a photo and see it full-screen on my laptop, you know, right away. Nope. Now this isn't Eye-Fi's fault, but Windows Photo Gallery doesn't like to display photos that have been added to a folder after the program has been started. Viewing photos as they're transmitted means setting down the camera, and manipulating (clicking) files one by one.

I mention this because there could be a way to get around all this: a real application. Like, software support. Something that allows you to actually configure the card with a little granularity. Something with a full-screen preview. And I could see sending files to the card coming in handy--you can't. The manager is, to coin a term for chunky, obtuse software, robust. There's little more outside of the convenience of wirelessness.

And that wirelessness is limited: each network must be pre-configured if the card is going to transmit through it, so hotspot support is, effectively, nonexistent. You can't be near an Internet connection and know that your photos are getting backed up at home; you have to be home and your camera, obviously, has to be on.

Which means that if your camera turns off after, oh, a minute of non-use, the transfer stops. And the number of photos that get transferred in that minute is probably less than the number of photos that need transferring.

Before this all sounds too disparaging, I have to say that the convenience works flawlessly. The Eye-Fi is excellent at moving .jpgs from a camera to an automatically generated, dated folder on a computer. I couldn't tell if the card affected battery life, so that's good.

As a regular ol' SD card, I was nonplussed by the transfer rates; they're on par with a 66x card (150x cards exist), transferring files just under 10MB/s. Wireless transfers seemed to go about the same speed, maybe a little slower.

But with all these caveats, how much harder is it to pop a card into a reader? Would using a faster card that needs plugging in save more time? (Probably.) Does getting the photos pre-sorted count for that much? (You tell me.)

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Page 1: Introduction and First Looks
Page 2: Installation, In Use
Page 3: Conclusion

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by aireiq on July 30, 2008 - 11:10 pm

I may have read too quickly. Any info on compatibility with Mac/Loonix?

2 - Posted by Max Slowik on July 31, 2008 - 2:03 pm

http://support.eye.fi/downloads/

Mac and Windows XP/Vista officially, Linux, unofficially:

http://dave-hansen.blogspot.com/

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