Eye-Fi Inc., makers of the world’s first wireless memory card for digital cameras, recently announced enhancements to its family of Eye-Fi cards that will make the upload of digital photos from camera to computer twice as fast. The faster wireless speeds, enabled via a firmware upgrade, will also be made available to existing Eye-Fi users at no extra cost. In addition, users will be able to upgrade their Eye-Fi cards to add the individual services they want, including Web sharing, geotagging and hotspot access, for a annual fee. Read More…
Pretec, the leader in CompactFlash card capacity and speed, has done it again with the announcement of 64GB and 100GB CF cards at Photokina 2008. According to DPReview, the new 233X CF cards can write up to 35MB/s. If that isn’t fast enough for you, they have slightly smaller capacity 32GB and 50GB CF cards that can do 50MB/s.
These cards sound really sweet for the new DSLRs that shoots 20+ MP and/or HD videos, such as Sony A900, Canon EOS-5D Mark II, and Nikon D90. Before you buy one of those though, check with your camera’s manufacturer to make sure your camera supports it. Pretec 233X 64GB and 333X 32GB CF cards are slated to start delivery by Photokina 2008 with suggested retail price of $399 and $630, and 233X 100GB and 333X 50GB are expected to become available by the end of 2008.
The Eye-Fi is a secure digital (SD) format memory card with Wi-Fi (802.11g, 54mbps) that can wirelessly send photos from a digital camera to a computer or photo sharing service of your choice. It has generated quite some buzz on gadget blogs (Engadget, Gizmodo, CrunchGear) but some mixed reviews (Post-Bulletin, PC World, DPReview) since its launch.
Overall, it works as advertised but comes with some limitations. For example,
It only transmits JPEG photos, raw shooters are out of luck (The company says other formats and raw support are coming).
It has limited range (< 45ft, and practically <20ft).
It only works on trusted, encrypted, pre-configured wireless network but not open access points.
It is only in SD format (some have reported it works with a SD-to-CF adapter).
It is slow to start and slow to upload especially when uploading to online photo sharing sites.
It uploads everything, no way of selecting images for upload.
Despite the limitations, it does come with a reasonable price of $100. If you find it fun or useful for you (with the limitations), you may want to give it a try.
