Customer Reviews

Eye-Fi Pro 4 GB SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-4PC

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Professional camera systems (Nikon, Canon, Olympus, etc.) have been attempting to do what Eye-Fi Pro does for a couple of years and all of their solutions are clunky. Eye-Fi is not a tool for people who do not take photography seriously. It uses technologies that will require some understanding of computer setup. You need to setup a wireless network, setup your sharing sites, storage path, etc. It could not be any easier, but that is sometimes not easy enough for casual users of computers and technology in general.

If you are a little knowledgeable of computers and technology, then this product can make the process of getting your photos where they need to be so you can share and edit them. It takes care of one of the things that many people have the most trouble with pictures; putting them on your computer.

The Pro version was an automatic buy for me. I have been waiting for a "Pro" version because I shoot RAW and the previous products; while great, wouldn't do anything more me without RAW support.

I am an avid amateur photographer and average around 1,000-2,000 images a week. I had a little trouble getting the configurations set just right with the eye-fi pro card and my Nikon D40. However, once I did get them all set I found this to be an amazing addition to my photography arsenal. The wireless upload is amazing and considering I only shoot in RAW the upload time is impressive. I just recently set up an ad-hoc connection as well and I have found that to be quite useful. I cannot recommend this highly enough as it makes your photography workflow much more efficient. I even set up an auto import into Adobe Lightroom so that my photos are already there for any post-production work needed. One of the best resources is the message forum on the eye-fi site as many other users have posted useful information. Should a need arise for you to contact customer service, I can say that my experiences have been nothing but stellar. I was walked a troubleshooting items and even received a return phone call for follow up. This purchase is well worth the money and the only thing I hope for in the near future is a larger capacity card, say 32gb.

I have been a beta tester for this product, and the added features of this card have really streamlined my workflow. I just finished photographing 150+ dance students - the card connected seamlessly to my dell vista laptop using the wireless ad hoc feature, over 3000 pics shot in RAW format on my Canon 1D Mark2 transferred nicely.

The speed was good - clients were able to view pics of the dancers as I was shooting - by the time I finished each class, the orders were complete! The added assurance of having my files backed up right away was nice too.

Great product, great tech support, if you have any need to transfer photos to your computer or to the internet, this is a must have! Nice work Eye-Fi.

I knew about Eye-Fi since its appearance in 2005 but waited for RAW-file support. The idea is great - you set up your card once and forever forget about both storage and transfer problems. The software needs some work though. But it's getting done from the look of it.

There are 4 types of cards which essentially vary only in size. The rest is marketing and software options. Idea of selling the same stuff to different people for different amounts of money isn't new (hello, Microsoft). The more you pay, the more options you get: local storage, web storage, video, RAW-file support. It even looks like you can buy extra "services" for cheaper cards (didn't test this though).

The wi-fi part is rock-solid. It works via my private access point, via ad-hoc (with my notebook), via open access-points (SSL to own server, nothing to worry about here).

The RAW-file support is okay, but is currently limited to local computer storage, even though SmugMug supports RAW-file upload.

I had problems with unsupported browser (Google Chrome v3beta) - but I was warned. The local computer upload was unreliable, the PC-software crashed frequently. It was all fixed when I started the Eye-Fi Manager inside MSIE. However if your default browser is not supported you have to manually start Eye-Fi Manager in the supported one - no way to choose the browser in the Eye-Fi Manager. The browser isn't needed for proper operation - it's for configuration and status display.

Nikon D90 (and up, I assume) has a menu switch for Eye-Fi.

The card is unexpectedly slow. Test on a PC shows 2MiB/sec but inside my camera (D70s) it's more like 1MiB/sec.

Also, for paranoid types - the Eye-Fi Manager keeps two ports (one TCP, one UDP) open at all times.

UPDATE: Eye-Fi provides extremely helpful support. All my problems were addressed and fixed in interim releases of the Eye-Fi Manager software. I'm very happy with it.

I became interested in Eye-Fi after finding someone I followed on Twitter used their cards. An interesting idea, I thought. When I bought my Canon XSi, I ordered one of these cards to go with it.

Set up is easy. The software installs off the card, or you can download it from the website. Once the software is installed, you can create an account on the Eye-Fi website to configure the card, where the photos will be sent, what networks to join, etc. Take the time to set up every network you're on semi regularly, as you can only do this while the card is connected to the computer. Many of the other settings you can do from the website, without the card.

Once configured, pictures start flying over the wireless network shortly after you take them. They can download to a folder of your hard drive, or to iPhoto, which works quite well. You can have separate destinations for JPEG and RAW files (I have my RAW files saved on a different partition than the JPEG files). You can also configure different photo sharing websites to upload to, including Flickr, Gallery 2, and many others.

The card has worked very well for me, and I love not having to use a USB cable to share a picture I just took. I'd recommend this card to anyone, however there are a few "gotchas" that I wish I knew about before hand:

- You can only share to one photo site at a time. With the current software, you can have multiple sites configured, but only one of them can be active at a time. Not a huge problem for me, but might be for some. There may be work-arounds that you can try.

- RAW and JPEG downloads can be in different locations, but not different computers. This wasn't a deal breaker for me, either, but it did hamper how I wanted things set up. I wanted my RAW files downloaded to a computer away from home for archival purposes. I've been able to work around this with some AppleScript, though.

All things considered, I love this card. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but it keeps up with the snapshots in my life as they happen. Things start appearing on Flickr minutes after they happen, and when I start up iPhoto, images start downloading and importing. If you're tired of the hassle needed to share pictures from your digital camera, get one of these! You won't regret it!

Installation went exactly as expected on my windows xp pro system. The packaging is minimal and simple, as is the instruction book. The simplicity is deceptive as you must understand how your wifi network works if you choose to use the adhoc network setup.

Web registration is required to register the device even if it will be used with adhoc networking.

The range of this device is not as good as other wifi devices, I suspect that the antenna crammed inside the sd-slot within a camera reduces the effective range of a device like this. I found the card would detect networks but at the edges of the network footprint it would not transfer images. Battery drain is noticeably higher but the loss is offset by the time saved docking the camera.

Adhoc networking is useful, the instructions provided were sufficient for windows and intel managed wifi cards however I was using another brand. The camera was out of the useful range of the router so I setup the adhoc network on a secondary nic to get around this. When powering up the camera it takes 20-30 seconds to connect to the adhoc network.

Of my two cameras one has the ability to disable and modify power management/sleep settings, the other doesn't. Power management sleep will interrupt transfers. If your camera has options to disable power management I highly recommend it if you take a lot of high resolution pictures. The camera may sleep before the uploads are finished and wakeup/reconnect will take 30 seconds to restart once the camera is powered back up. Interruptions to the network connection, power and low signal really slow the transfers. The card will retry automatically and generally reconnects in a timely manner. Occasionally the card did not reconnect fast enough for my preference.

The data write is a bit slower than my better SDHC cards, saving movies takes considerably longer to close the files, as does taking bursts of multiple images for longer than 3-4 seconds at a time. This is not a big problem for 99% of what I do.

Geotagging is interesting when using the SkyJack database, it was surprising to find my photos located closely to the actual shot on google maps. I'm waiting for GPS geotagging or some hybrid combination of GPS and skyjack.

I use picasa to manage my albums, it monitors the folders where eye-fi saves the files so they are uploaded almost immediately to picasa after they are taken. A lot of features for a reasonable price. Very happy with it.

My wife was very skeptical of Eye-Fi at first -- why not just plug in the cable to transfer the pictures to the computer? But since having one of their first cards, she can't live without it. (And, in fact, hasn't even bothered installing the camera software on her new computer -- there's no point with Eye-Fi.) It's not just the lack of the cable, but the time and effort saved in transferring the photos and getting them where you want, whether it's on your PC or on your favorite photo site. And the Eye-Fi Pro adds a bunch of new features that really appeal to me, like the ad hoc connection capability which can get your photos out of the camera even when you're remote, as long as your computer is there.

I've been using a beta version of this card for the last few weeks and it's really impressive! With the Eye-Fi card and my Nikon D90, I have been able to wirelessly transfer both RAW images and video directly to my MacBook Pro.

This is actually the third Eye-Fi card I've used...I lost the first one and found it just too hard to return to the routine of removing the card from the camera, finding my SD reader, plugging it in and (most importantly) remembering to put the card back in the camera.

Side note: Eye-Fi's customer service is great, they were able to refund/transfer a Geotagging subscription I purchased for the lost card so I could apply it toward the new card. I believe the Pro model has unlimited geotagging, which works well. I think the geotagging is based off Wi-Fi triangulation. It even found my location in the parks at Walt Disney World!

The speedy upload of the large RAW files (usually around 7-9 MB) is great. You can even setup the card for an ad hoc connection, so wireless uploads go directly to your computer. You'll love the Eye-Fi card because it is easier to get around to adjusting and uploading images to Flickr when they are automatically waiting for you at the computer.

Finally, the selective upload feature is helpful because it lets you select which images you want to upload so you don't waste disk space with bad photos.

If you are going buy only one SD card, this is the one you want!

I am happy with the card.
It took me a while to set up the ad-hoc connection, but in all honesty that was operator error. (one can not log into an ad-hoc network using a miss-typed network name and expect to get a connection...) Once I realized I was trying to connect to the wrong network, all went well. It is very cool to set you camera down, and see the images slide down the screen as they automatically transfer to you computer. I wish that Adobe bridge was aware of the card so I could edit the Meda-data as the images come in, but that is a minor issue.
I use this in a Nikon D80 and my one major disappointment with this card is that I am not able to use the card with out setting the meter to stay on for 30 minutes, thus hammering the battery life. My method of dealing with this is to set the custom setting no 28 Auto-Meter off to 30 min, only when I actually want to upload photos, and set it back to 4 sec when I am not transferring photos, otherwise the camera will just drain the battery much faster that than it should. I have not tried using the card in a different camera yet, so this issue may have been addressed on later model cameras.
The Geo-tagging works well when you are in an area that is covered by wireless networks that are known to the system, and adding your own network is fairly easy.
The auto upload to Flickr is nice. Just set it to only upload selected photos otherwise everything goes up, which is not an ideal situation, at least for me anyway.
All in all I am happy with the card, and I got it from amazon at a fair discount so all is well... :)

I've been a pro photographer and studio owner for 30 years. [...].
This is the most incredible thing I've ever used. I had their previous (.jpg only) version and it was a novelty. Tried it - and it worked, but not really ready for pro's.

It needed raw support. The new PRO card (this one) supports RAW and movies. My shots are uploaded to my computer as I shoot them in my studio. My Canon 1D MKII raw files are about 6.5mb and each one transfers to the computer through the air in 10 seconds. When I shoot outdoors behind the studio, I do my session shots and when I come in range of the router (network) the outdoor files are then uploaded as well.

Amazing that it fits all this network support in a SD card. Company is great for addressing/resolving support problems. This item has now been around a while and appears most all the bugs are out. I'm thrilled.
Ron - [...].