Eye-Fi announced the next generation Wi-Fi enabled SD memory card at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV. The new class-6 card has 8GB memory and is capable of 802.11n Wi-Fi connection. One interesting new feature is the so-called Endless Memory Mode, which automatically deletes photos and videos as they’re uploaded. Basically it means you have virtually unlimited storage if you have a wireless connection. It also comes with a new Eye-Fi Center software for viewing and sharing management. The new card is bundked with unlimited geotagging.
The great features of the “Pro” line of Eye-Fi cards are: 1) RAW format support, 2) Ad-hoc networking support so you can wirelessly transfer photos and videos to your laptop computer directly without a Wi-Fi access point. You can even setup auto slideshow using Adobe Lightroom2.
Further reading
Availability
The Eye-Fi Wi-Fi cards are amazing achievement of digital technology. By incorporating a complete Wi-Fi chip inside the tiny SDHC card together with storage capacity, the Eye-Fi cards enable digital photographers to wirelessly transmit photos, and now videos as well, to their computers and Internet photo/video sharing sites. Some even offer geotagging capability by using location information of known wireless access points.
Now, the company is shipping the 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video
and Eye-Fi Share Video
models for $99 and $79 respectively. The differences between these two are that the former offers unlimited Geotagging and one year of Hotspot Access. If you decided to go with the latter, you can still add Geotagging and Hotspoint Access services for $14.99/year per feature. Read More…
Do you still remember the Lexar Shoot-n-Sync WiFi SD Card we talked about a while ago? It appeared to be just a Lexar-branded Eye-fi card. It turned out to be exactly the case. The Lexar even uses the same Eye-fi management software according to its support site.
Back then I was curious about why Eye-fi has three flavors (Home, Share, and Explorer) but Lexar only has one. After reading the review by CrunchGear, I now know why: you simply choose to pay $15/year to add unlimited Geotagging. Another $15/year gives you the access to wi-fi hotspots managed by Wayport. Actually this is just like the customized service upgrades offered by Eye-fi.
According to the review, the Lexar Shoot-n-Sync WiFi SD card only supports wireless uploading and sharing of jpeg files. It won’t do anything to a RAW file. If you are a RAW shooter, you can shoot RAW+JPEG, it will upload the JPEG but leave the RAW untouched on the SD card. It may be OK for casual usages but is quite limited for serious RAW shooters who can fill up 2GB in no time. Hopefully larger capacity versions and CompactFlash (CF) form factor will be available soon.
Available Eye-Fi products
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…
Posted in
News on September 29th, 2008.
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Do you know that more than 350 million digital images are captured every day, and four out of five of those images are never shared? Wow… think about all those dormant photos on your hard-drive! Some innovative companies have thought about this and created some really nice products. Heard about the Eye-Fi? Now you can set free your photos with the Lexar Shoot-n-Sync Wi-Fi® Memory Card, which uses the same innovative wireless technology as in Eye-Fi cards for uploading digital photos to computers as well as sharing them via social networking and photo-sharing websites. Read More…
Posted in
Accessories on September 19th, 2008.
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Sony has just announced Vaio Wi-Fi digital photo frame model VGF-CP1, featuring a 7″ display with 800×480 resolution with 16M+ colors, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), 128MB internal memory, Memory Stick/SD/CF card slots, RSS feed reader and a built-in MP3 player that can play SHOUTcast Internet radio using its stereo speakers. The CP1 digital photo frame can also play back photos stored on your PC and on Google’s Picasa Web Albums wirelessly. It will cost about $300 and be available in mid October.
Posted in
Photo Frame on September 4th, 2008.
1 Comment.
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.
Posted in
Accessories on November 4th, 2007.
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