My Eye-Fi Review

As posted earlier I purchased the Eye-Fi wireless SD card for my digital camera. This is one of those items I wish I had long ago, it just became availible in October and I don't know how I missed it until this year. Because I am cheap I shopped for the best deal, and Costco.com provided free delivery and $10 off the $99 MSRP, so $89 poorer my patience had to endure the week it took UPS to get it in my hands. Because I was anxious to learn more about my investment I Google'd for some reviews to see how it worked and how people rated it. Pleasntly surpised most reviewed it favorably, with most of the critics just pointed to the fact that the Wi-Fi transfer speed for your 10 Megapixel photos takes too long. My response to that is, WHY do you need 10MP photos? Are you in the business of posting bullitin board graphics online and plotting out poster size prints of your daily shots? If you are into high quality photography and your camera is a mega expensive digital SLR and you typically need a portable hardrive to backup all your gigantic photos you take, than this is not for you. If you have a pocket point & shoot that used a SD chip, you loath the hassle of locating your card reader or USB cable, and you typically just like to quickly share the latest shots of your kids, adventures, or need to get your ebay photos online, this chip will be just the ticket.

Just like the instructions state, and the reviewers confirm, it takes less than 5 minutes to go from opening the box to snapping photos and having them magically appear online. The one thing I found interesting, is my Picasa web album was getting the photos about 2-3 minutes before my hardrive was. So it is apparent that the card sends the photos to Eye-Fi's system, then back down to your computer. When setting up your card, you do need to create a Eye-Fi account, that concerns in the event they go broke as companies like this often do, will my card become just your ordinary 2GB memory card w/o them to handle my uploads? On the bright side, from my understanding of the service, they hang on to your photos for you until they are safely stored on your computer in the event your computer is turned off. One example where you may want to resort to the old fashoned way of taking photos, is if you have a large assortment of photos you plan to take before you will be near one of your pre-set Wi-Fi upload spots, and then are in a hurry to review them. Because they do take a minute or so each to transfer, if you have 100 shots, it would be much faster to just use the provided USB reader to copy the photos to your hardrive. Since my typical collection of new photos is rarely this many, I would be fine with allowing the chip to do my work for me while I take off my shoes, and watch the evening news.

The choice to invest in this was simple for me, I often take only a few shots each time I power-up my camera, and then I usually want those photos off the camera as soon as I get home. Now with the Eye-Fi chip, the only thing I need to remember is to turn my camera on when I want my pics, and by the time get a chance to sit down, my photos will be there to greet me.

As this is my first night with my new toy, you can be sure I will post some more details on how it is working out in the near future. Now if there was only something to photograph?