Ryan Block over at Engadget put the now-shipping Eye-Fi WiFi SD card though the paces and shows that like many first-generation products, you’ll find some flaws. On paper, the Eye-Fi sounds fantastic and simple: pop the 2 GB SD card in your camera, take pics, send them to your home PC or upload them to one of 17 photo-sharing websites. Truth be told: the Eye-Fi certainly does do that, but it’s not the ubiquitous solution you’d hope for just yet due to some current limitations:
- You can’t pick and choose which photos are sent, so if you’re trigger-happy, you’ll be sending a ton of photos. Could be a problem because…
- All photos are sent in their native res. Not only are you sending all pics, but you’re sending uncompressed pics, so it could take a while.
- Connection to open WiFi spots could be challenging unless you’ve done the setup in advance. According to Ryan, the Eye-Fi “only connects to trusted, encrypted, pre-configured networks“
At $99 for WiFi capability plus 2 GB of memory, it’s still a very interesting and reasonably priced product since you’re adding WiFi to practically any camera that supports SD memory. I don’t know if the product firmware can be updated; if it can and some of the limitations can be addressed, I might pick one of these up. If not, I’ll likely wait for a future version and stick with my current “solution”: a SanDisk SD card that folds in half to expose a USB interface. Not quite the same at all, but it works across all of my devices.
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