Random Reviews

I’ve been using the eye-fi card for a few months now and I love the thing. I wholeheartedly recommend picking one of these up if you shoot pictures (and now video!) using a digital camera that supports SDHC cards (which is most modern consumer cameras). So what does this thing do and what makes it so great? Basically it’s like any other memory card, you take pictures and it stores them; the big difference is what happens after that…The eye-fi card also has built into it a wi-fi radio that supports 802.11b and 802.11g, this means that once you’ve taken your pictures if you are in range of a wireless network that it can join it will automatically start uploading the photos to wherever you set it up to send them. Personally, I have it upload to my home computer and my smugmug account. The eye-fi card will join any open network it happens to find and you can program it to join networks that you have the WEP/WPA keys for using the included software (which is very easy and straightforward to use). Depending on the card you get it can also connect to wayport hotspots which are EVERYWHERE.

Eye-fi supports a ton of photo sharing services including the important ones:

1. Smugmug - my personal favorite
2. Flickr
3. Facebook
4. Kodak Gallery
5. Picasa
6. Snapfish
7. Shutterfly
8. MobileMe (.Mac)

and several more (full list). As I mentioned earlier, it will also put a copy of the photos on your local computer for you in a specified folder and if you’re using a Mac (which you should be), it can even add them to your iPhoto library automatically for you.

When you setup the card you can also set notifications that it sends when it starts uploading and completes uploading. This includes both email notifications and text message notifications (or any combination thereof). This is great when you’re out of the house as you will frequently hit a wi-fi hotspot you didn’t know was there. You see a text telling you the card started uploading and you can decide to hang out and wait for it to finish or whatever.

The card uploads pretty fast too, I’m using a DSLR most of the time and have no upload speed complaints at all; with a P&S it’s only going to be faster due to smaller file sizes. Last I timed it (you can see progress as it uploads on your computer) it seems to average about 2-3 seconds per photo. If you took 100 photos that’s just over 4 minutes to upload all of them. Even with rapid-fire dslr shooting I rarely shoot 100 photos in one “session” with my kid at the park or whatever. It’s unlikely you’d be waiting around for it to finish for very long.

Eye-Fi does also have a geotagging service which uses IP based geography lookups to determine where you were when the photo was taken. This works reasonably well but it’s not the same as actually having a GPS enabled camera. To be honest I’m not 100% sure I’m into this, I take a lot of pictures of my kid and there are a lot of weirdos out there I’d prefer NOT know where my kid is.

The great thing about the card and service is that it really does “just work” from the time I pulled the card out of the box to the time it was in the camera being used to seamlessly upload pictures was maybe 5-10 minutes. It’s very rare that I find a product lives up to the expectations I have for it the way the eye-fi has. If you’re not the gadget-type and aren’t super technically inclined this is probably an even more useful product for you as once it’s setup all you have to do is take pictures. Forget thinking about connecting your camera and downloading them, worst case scenario is you get home and turn the camera on until it finishes uploading (which it informs you it has done).

Ok, now that I’ve explained how much I love the eye-fi let me give you my gripes, which are relatively few but for me important.

#1 No Camera RAW support For a lot of people this won’t matter (if you use a point & shoot camera this will be irrelevant to you). However, if you shoot with a DSLR camera like I do most of the time (Nikon D90 which I love) it’s probable that you’ll want to shoot RAW at least some of time (I always do). Eye-Fi can only upload jpeg files as of right now (I do have on good authority that this will be changing soon). For me this means that I have to do 2 things I wouldn’t otherwise… First, I have to shoot in RAW+JPEG which takes up more space on the card and bugs me (I’m cantankerous). Second, when I want to get the RAW files off the card I have to pull it out of the camera and stick it in the computer to pull them off or hook up the camera to the computer. I used to do this anyway so it’s not that big of a deal, or rather it wouldn’t be if eye-fi didn’t make me understand how absolutely glorious it is to NOT have to do this when I use my P&S camera.

#2 Slow-ish memory The card isn’t a high-performing card, I don’t mean it’s crummy by any means, it just doesn’t have a very fast write speed (meaning the camera writing pictures to the card). This is a non-issue again for you P&S guys, but if you shoot with a DSLR it’s going to cause you to wait at some point if you shoot using “auto-fire” on your camera and take a lot of shots. This is amplified by needing to use RAW+JPEG mode as I mentioned above because there is that much more data to write. This is a hardware limitation and won’t ever be fixed by a software upgrade as my first gripe could potentially be. That said if #1 was remedied this would be somewhat (although not completely) alleviated because I’d be writing less data to the card for each shot, thus reducing the amount of wait time.

Why you shouldn’t care about my gripes: This is a review site, it’s my “job” to point out anything at all that bugs me, which is exactly what I’m doing. Even with these two issues the Eye-fi has completely improved my camera workflow. There are a lot of times that I don’t need to shoot in RAW but do anyway, I like the option to be able to fully tweak the image later if it’s a great shot that just needs a little adjustment. I’m not aware of any P&S camera that even is able to shoot raw (without hacks, etc. which I won’t go into) so you shouldn’t even think about this as an issue if you’re using only a P&S camera. Even though I have to take the card out to get the RAW images off I still benefit from the auto-upload of the jpegs first. It allows me to quickly review things on a real screen and know what shots I got that were good and what weren’t worth bothering once I do suck the RAW images into Aperture.

The gripes I listed are pretty specific to someone who is a professional photographer (which I am not) or someone who likes to pretend they are a professional photographer (ok, yea that’s me). This is an OUTSTANDING product, and they just came out with an updated card that supports uploading of video to youtube, etc. If you take pictures with a digital camera having one of these cards will drastically improve your life. Well, your “photography life” anyway.

I’d suggest just pre-ordering one of the video cards, they are supposed to ship toward the end of March. I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Disclaimer/Apology: I just re-read this review prior to posting and it’s by far and away the most positive review I’ve given anything. I almost feel sick reading it but it’s a damn fine product so what can I do? I’ll be sure to find something terrible to review soon so I can return to my normal sarcastic and degrading style.

Tags: cameras, gadgets, iphone, photography

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Doesn't Suck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.