Eye-Fi wireless 2GB card

[Illuminati]

I was fortunate enough to gain free admission into this year's Macworld Expo in San Francisco. One of the products that caught my eye was a nifty product called the Eye-Fi wireless 2GB SD Card. It is a standard 2GB SD memory card combined with a Wi-Fi transmitter that allows you to upload photos wirelessly from your camera to your PC, Mac, or online photo-sharing site (like Flickr). As you take photos, the 2GB of memory stores them. When the Eye-Fi comes in contact with an open or pre-configured Wi-Fi connection, the photos stored in memory will begin to upload to your destination. The card supposedly does not drain much from the camera's battery, as it has very low power consumption.

I watched as the demonstrator took a photo, and watched as it uploaded almost instantly to the demo Mac and into iPhoto. Being the skeptic, I asked if I could try the memory card in my K100D and see what happens then. Fortunately, he agreed, and I popped it in the DSLR. I took a snapshot, and nothing happened. That's when I learned that the Eye-Fi does not support RAW files yet. I changed the quality from RAW to *** and gave it another attempt. It seemed to take longer to save the JPEG to the card and get it into iPhoto when compared to the digital P&S that they were using for the demo. This time, however, the image did upload successfully, although the upload time was considerably longer as well.

I can see much potential for this company's product, especially with event photographers. They just need to up the memory to 4GB, and support RAW before I'll consider buying one. At $99, it's somewhat reasonable for a realtime wireless storage solution, but pricey for just a memory card.

Here's their site: http://www.eye.fi/

- Jason

[nadnerb]

I'm sure these have been around for years now.
At least I remember seeing a similar report a few years back.

The idea is good, but like you say, it's slow!
No doubt the demo P&S was set to the lowest quality and the smallest file size.