Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

The Nikon WT-4A Wireless Transmitter does more than file transfer, it allows wireless control of your Nikon camera using Camera Control Pro 2 software. But it is also very expensive. If you just need a wireless file transfer solution for your Nikon D800, you may want to consider the Eye-Fi Pro X2 8 GB Class 6 SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card instead. For ~$92, it can wirelessly transfer your files (including RAW) from Nikon D800. What’s even better? The Nikon D800 comes with a SD card slot and built-in Eye-Fi support according to the User’s Manual.

The following is the Eye-Fi icon in the information display of Nikon D800.

Nikon D800 Eye-Fi Icon

One cool feature that may be interesting is the so-called Direct Mode. It allows you to beam images directly to your smart phone or tablet (iOS and Android are supported) by turning the Eye-Fi card into a wireless hot spot. The Direct Mode also works with a computer with wireless networking capability. Here is a how-to article on how to setup the Direct Mode with an iPad. It will definitely be a good experience with the recently announced iPAD with retina display (2048×1536).

One potential issue may be the file transfer speed. The Eye-Fi Pro X2 card supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n standards. The speed of 802.11n network is quite good but the images files produced by Nikon D800 can be fairly large. Uncompressed 14-bit RAW files are about 74 MB each. Losslessly compressed NEF is nearly the half at ~ 41 MB each but is still quite big. JPEG files can be a lot smaller. Large/Fine JPEG is about 16 MB. So this option may not be ideal as a replacement for tethered shooting using RAW format but may work well for viewing JPEG files on a tablet or as a background file transfer option when transfer speed is not critical.