Customer Reviews

Eye-Fi Explore 2 GB Wi-Fi SD Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-2EX (OLD VERSION)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

So, I'm the kind of guy who takes a million pictures of the kids and then they sit in my digital camera for 6 months. This device is perfect for me. Just snap away and then turn my camera on for a few minutes at home or in a Wi-Fi enabled McDonald's - bingo!

Take it out of the box, plug it into a USB port with the handy plug, and take about 4 minutes to set it up. It just works like a breeze.

Geotagging works perfectly for me. If it doesn't work for you, you can actually go in and set up the location of your routers so that it will work. The reviewer who complained about this could have spent about 2 minutes and fixed this issue.

I have my account set up to automatically post my photos to Flickr as well as downloading them to a directory on my PC. The Eye-Fi supports probably 10-12 of the most popular photo sharing sites.

The only thing on my wish list is for the card to upload video I take with my digital camera (right now only jpg file format is supported). I contacted support and they confirmed they are getting a lot of requests for that feature - so it may be on its way sometime.

This is the best new product I have ever seen! This card works perfectly with many of my SD cameras completely rendering cables useless!!

First off, the registration. A quick and simple registration (which you must have an internet connection for) helps you register the Eye-Fi Card with Eye-Fi's server to prevent unauthorized users from using *your* Eye-Fi Card. During the registration process, you also set up your wireless network (with your personal wireless DHCP enabled router), which works with Open, WEP or WPA encryption. It sends a test packet to the Eye-Fi Server, and once it verifies it's arrival, BAM! Your wireless network is set up. The next two are setting up your photo sharing accounts, personally, I use Webshots, and also directing your photos where to save on your computer. After that, you slap your Eye-Fi Card in your camera, take a picture and wammo! The picture is on the hard drive and on the photo sharing web site!

With so many new features added in the past few months, like geotagging and hotspot access on the Explore Card, this has become a necessity for anyone who uses a digital camera on a regular basis. I have not noticed any excessive battery usage on any of my cameras, which are two Nikons and a Canon.

Now, there are additional features, such as e-mail and SMS notifications, so if I'm not near my computer, I don't have to check the Eye-Fi Manager to see if my pictures have uploaded, my phone will tell me so.

It's a great product, but, please, don't buy this card with the intention that it will do what it is not advertised to do, such as create a wireless connection for your PDA, transfer RAW and movie files, send pictures back and forth between your digital picture frame and your camera. No, only JPG files, folks. And it does it flawlessly!

The speed with which the card arrived gave a new meaning to two-day shipping. It was ordered on 12/1, and showed up on 12/2. Kudos to Amazon and UPS.

I shot a few photos right away and was able to get them downloaded and geotagged without any trouble. This is my second Eye-fi card (yes, they can be broken), and once you accept the quirkiness of how they move photos around, it does make some sense. Also, being able to get a text message on my cell to tell me the card is finished offloading the newest images is a useful feature, I liked that.

Over the next few days I shot some more pictures, and the geotagging never worked well:

1) One set of photos on 12/4 was tagged with a location 40 miles away.
2) Another set on 12/5 was not tagged at all, even though I was well inside Skyhook's WPS coverage area (according to Skyhook's website).
3) A third set of photos on 12/6 was (oddly) partly geotagged and partly not geotagged. The tagging was accurate, but the images were all shot over ten minutes in and around a neighbor's house, and should all have gotten the same location.
4) I would tell you how the fourth set of photos was geotagged (walking around UNC's campus on 12/7), but after taking a half a dozen shots, the card just plain died. My Canon said it was unusable and locked. My Nikon said it was corrupt, but formatable. My PC could not see it at all. After formatting in the Nikon, it would immediately read as corrupted if I tried to use it in either camera.

So, my experience is that the Eye-fi Explore works just fine as an Eye-fi card, but that the geotagging is a bust: sometimes it does not work at all, sometimes it works wrong. As a bonus, the card died in just five days. I mailed everything back to Amazon yesterday.

The card was a gift. I hate having to return gifts, it's awkward.

Aside from the bad geotagging and the rapid failure, I would have given this card four stars. It still gets two, since it did function just fine as a vanilla Eye-fi card for a few days.

I was able to set it up to use my home network easily enough and it transferred the files just about as quickly as we could take them. A few days later I was taking Christmas photos and it simply stopped working, even as a simple SD card, in the middle of everything. I've tried every camera and PC SD/SDHC card reader I can get my hands on but none of them are able to access the card anymore. I was told there would be no way to recover any of the photos. I've never had any problem with any of the dozen other SD/SDHC cards I've used ranging from 256MB to 16GB.

I purchased the eye-fi explore for the ability to geotag my pictures and to make sure I never accidentally deleted a shot that I really liked. After a little troubleshooting (and a very speedy response from eye-fi customer care) we were able to get it to work with my Canon XSi.

The card works great! The little thumbnail on your desktop is helpful too, as it shows the photos transfering right onto your computer.

The only thing keeping me from giving this a 5 star review is the current lack of support for RAW photos, only JPEG. While this is a minor gripe for most, the XSi shines in RAW mode. I believe this is a feature that will be added, so I will have full functionality at that time.

Wonderful product, highly recommended and a must have for all SD card users!

This would be a great device if it worked. The card was fully functional for 2 days, then abruptly stopped being recognized by either the camera or the computer I used to set it up. Great disappointment. I have contacted Eye-Fi customer service and will update this post based on their response.

Believe what you read about the failure rate. It worked ok for 1 week and then died taking 100s of pics to the grave with it. I saw the other reviews but somehow thought that since I'm more tech savvy than the average joe, that my experience would be different.

Keep it simple. Just buy a bigger SD card.

I usually wait for months to download photos from the camera - but no longer! Now my parents can see my kids photos up on the web a few minutes after I've taken them. This is a great little device. And so far it's been 100% reliable.
Only downside is how quickly it kills the battery of my D60. I have a spare, but then again because I know the photos will go somewhere I use the camera a lot more than before.
I've already recommended this to lots of my friends. Haven't had a chance to use it away from home - so not sure how well the geotagging or hotspot functions work - which means that so far, for me, the home version would have been just as good.

I love this product, with reservations. I love it enough that I continue to use it and encourage others to purchase it. The draw backs that I have are issues that I could probably resolve if I cared enough to try to resolve them!

The system works very well for uploading your photos to your computer, or to other photo services such as FLICKR, and many others. The issues I have is that sometimes I find my camera batteries dead after "not using the camera" for an extended period when this didn't happen previously. Sometimes I have to power cycle the camera to get all of the photos to upload.

That all being said, the support that the company provides is incredible. They even have support contacts on Twitter. The community is strong and I feel confident if I'd ask about these small issues I'd get them resolved. Even with the issues as they stand, I still use the card because the convenience it adds is worth it!

The tagging it does is very accurate. Everything the card is advertised to do, it does very well.

You might notice some claims of issues for geotagging, you may want to first check if your home is within the skyhookwireless coverage area (the company that provides for the geotagging connection). Their map of coverage areas is available on the following website: http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/coverage.php

Or if you're willing to plug in the common WiFi access points you use in your area if it is not covered, you can do so on the following website:
http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

You'll need the address and be connected to the wi-fi to see their Mac-Address so that skyhookwireless can "triangulate" your location.