[ The following article is sponsored by Eye-Fi. The device was provided free of charge, and I am being compensated for the time I took to review the product. The opinions expressed are entirely my own. -Ed. ]
By David Ponce
No one really likes cables. And the more electronic devices we own, the worse it gets. Anything anyone does to do away with all the spaghetti-like clutter is a good thing by my book. So that’s why I’ve always been a fan of Eye-Fi, makers of an SD card with an embedded Wi-Fi chip. Not only because it allows me to do away with the always-hard-to-find USB transfer cable, it actually makes my camera more useful (well, not quite my camera, no fault of Eye-Fi, but more on that in a minute). How so? By making it a snap to actually offload pictures from it and sharing them with whomever I like. This happens to be the entire point of cameras, but being the lazy person I am I’ve been known to leave pictures in there forever.
So does it work? Absolutely. Keep reading for a short review of the product.
I was sent the 4GB version of the card. Great! Being the owner of a Powershot A540 this meant I was out of luck: the camera only supports SDCH cards with a maximum size of 2GB. So I borrowed a friend’s Casio Exilim EX-FC100.
Installing the software that comes with the Eye-Fi card was simple. Just plug into your computer with the supplied SD card reader and the installation takes care of itself. Answer the prompts, enter your WiFi password and any one of 20 sharing sites’ info. After that, you turn your camera on and take pictures. They’ll be automatically sent to your PC as well as to the sharing sites you’ve specified, as long as you leave the power on since the card uses the cameras’ power. Go out, take pictures and come back home. As soon as you turn it on, it dumps everything you took right into your PC once again.
And that’s really all there is to it. It’s a simple product to use that works as advertised. Just make sure you check whether your camera accepts SDHC cards and that it won’t limit the maximum allowable size. This particular model is $79.99.
For a little more info, check out the below video.
[ Eye-Fi ]
I'm always looking for my camera cable. Well not always, just when I want to use it. Which is always!!!! I don't take pictures, I just transfer them.
I heard about this a while ago, and recommended it to all my photographer friends. They take amazing pictures, but often never find the time to upload it until months afterwards.
I'm surprised that nobody else has done this already
I remember seeing this product, but not knowing much about it. That is so cool. I think I might have to try it. I am always borrowing camera cables. I get to photos months later.
I heard of a woman that had her camera stolen with one of these in it.
Since the camera automatically uploaded to the internet they were able to find the guy that stole it…because he tool pictures of himself.
I reviewed this product as well. I was disappointed that while there are 28 photo sharing sites you can only upload to one of them at a time. I could not upload to Flickr and Picasa or Flickr and SmugMug at the same time. That is a weakness of this product in my opinion. Also the geotagging is not good (I paid to upgrade my card to have that feature, a waste)
I reviewed this product as well. I was disappointed that while there are 28 photo sharing sites you can only upload to one of them at a time. I could not upload to Flickr and Picasa or Flickr and SmugMug at the same time. That is a weakness of this product in my opinion. Also the geotagging is not good (I paid to upgrade my card to have that feature, a waste)