Customer Reviews

Eye-Fi Home Wireless 2 GB Secure Digital Card (EYE-FI-2HM)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

For starters, I researched the heck out of this thing before I bought it. The average ratings made me a little leery of trying it out, but the concept seemed interesting and great enough that I couldn't help it, so I bought one to use with my Canon SD1100 IS.

It's been great.

Pros:
Easy setup. No more wires for uploading pics. Works with practically any photo service (I post my pics to Facebook in near-realtime). Great fun, and it's surprising how much more likely I am to use the camera knowing that I really don't have to plug it in and upload the pics. I just turn it on when I get home, and a few minutes later, I edit the album details online.

Speed is fine. You're really only limited by your upload speed of your ISP. I have FIOS, so it's pretty darn fast.

Cons:

Mostly what other people have already noted. You can't upload video. This is not the huge problem you'd think it is. You basically wind up plugging in the camera when get home after you took video. Not exactly like you're losing anything, you had to do that before anyway.

The pictures are downloaded from the Eye-Fi service to a folder you specify, but within that folder they're created with the date in the following format: "October 22nd, 2008" which means folders don't sort right unless you sort by folder create date or modified date. That's kind of a pain.

To the user above who thinks Eye-Fi only wants you to create an account to violate your privacy: don't be paranoid. Their privacy policy looks pretty reasonable to me. I'd strongly suggest you read it for yourself before signing up, just so you know.[...]

All in all, I'm happy with it, and more pleased than reading some of the overly-cautious reviews would have led me to believe I'd be. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.

(Based on a few minutes of experimentation.)

Cool idea. Not sure if it's ready for prime time, especially for my target application: the non-tech-savvy, poor-fine-dexterity in-laws.

The one really big gotcha: it copies the photos, but does not delete them from the card after copying them. So what do you do when your card fills up? You could plug the card or camera into a computer and delete pictures, but wasn't the point to avoid that? You could wipe the card using the camera's UI, but are you sure you've copied all of the pictures? (Besides, what if the reason you're doing it is that you've run out of space, and are away from home so you can't copy those last few pictures?) My whole goal is to make the copy process be almost invisible, so that you just don't have to mess around with it... fail.

Range seems quite limited. Connection was iffy from my desk, perhaps 20 feet and a couple of walls from the router. (My PDA connects fine from here.) Since there's no UI on the camera, there's no way to tell that it's trying and failing to connect.

As others have said: The requirement for an Internet connection even for local copy is odd. Not a problem for me, but odd. Not copying videos: Bad.

Because the camera doesn't know what's going on, it might power off during the copy. They have you "optimize" its power settings by disabling automatic shutdown.

It's definitely not going to the in-laws. Not sure if I'll keep it for myself.

[ Update: I returned it. ]

This is awesome - requires minimal setup, automatically locates wireless networks, allows manual SSID entry, supports Open, WEP, WPA and WPA2 security. It has a good range, uploads fast (4 seconds for 2MB photos). Works great for batched photos. It automatically creates subfolders labeled by date of upload within the configured folder on the destination PC. One drawback is that it requires registration on their domain in order to perform the setup. It looks like the SD card becomes registered to a single user account on the Eye-Fi website. This can be changed by the user that performs the initial setup.

I am a professional fashion and glamour photographer and use a Canon EOS-1D Mark III.
I've had the Eye-Fi card for about a year and have found that tethering the photos to my PC has never been easier. Canon makes an attachment that sells for over $700 and is bulky.. The Eye-Fi card does the same thing for a fraction of the price.

I've wirelessly transferred over 35,000 images using my single Eye-Fi card, and it continues to work great!

Works as advertised, I am a network admin. in a small company with one camera shared by 25 people for documentation in the same building. Installed the software with no issues on a Windows 2003 SBS Server and works flawlessly.

Amazing product. Thinking of buying one for home.
Did 5 stars more like 4.5 stars... because I cant find a function to delete the pics from the SD after sucessfull upload.

I bought the Eye-Fi for the purpose of showing photos on a monitor without having to yank out my SD card every time. I didn't want the "tethered" alternative although it exists for every digital camera (cables to connect to your computer+tethering software+photo editing software). It stores my photos on my PC in addition to keeping it on the card, therefore I have a backup of my pix. I don't know what more you'd want this setup to do. I use it at work and at home, it's great at parties-real time photos in the blink of an eye. I hook it up to my TV that that has a PC input, send someone out to take pix, and people then watch how goofy their friends are!

I can live with 2GB, would be nicer if the Home version came with more GBs!

Pros:
+ works and does what it says it will do and does it pretty quickly.
+ battery life is only slightly reduced.

Cons:
- can't upload videos wirelessly (with this particular card).
- can only upload to one computer at a time (ie: if you have two computers that should be receiving the pictures, you're out of luck).

i really like this product ... before i had this, i would always get too lazy to upload my pictures (who has patience to go looking for the cables and whatnot). Now, my pictures are on my computer almost immediately which is great!

The product worked okay for a bit before it stopped working and was corrupted. I have been trying to get them to respond to my emails and requests for help and they haven't responded. I intend to give them bad reviews so that no one buys their product. No one should deal with a company that can't even respond to emails. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT.

I am astonished at all the negative reviews of this product! I got one last year and I think it's amazing! Setup and use has been completely trouble-free. It does what it's supposed to do, completely transparently. In use it becomes invisible. Take a picture, it shows up on the computer. As easy as that. It was just a bit over-priced when I got it, about $80. Now, at $50, it's a no-brainer. If your camera takes an SD card, get one. Period.

While generally a 1st adopter, I waited on the Eye-Fi until it dropped to a reasonable price. The 2GB version, at about $50, is a nice addition to your camera if you have a wireless home network. Download the iGliss PC Client and you can automatically post pictures to the web within seconds of snapping them.