Eye-Fi. . . Got a new toy

[wkearney99]

I've had two of them since Christmas and have generally been pleased with them. The only downside is they do hit the battery pretty hard. Especially in my wife's Nikon D40. You basically have to tell your camera not to go to sleep as quickly as before. This lets the card do it's thing. The card basically operates independently of the camera. The wifi part of it, that is. The camera just thinks it's a regular storage card. Behind the scenes the card is doing all the work, it just depends on the camera staying powered on long enough for it to finish. This means the camera's normal default shutdown time has to be extended. This combined with the wifi radio drains the battery a lot more than a regular card would. Not enough to be worrisome but you will want to bring along a spare battery (which we always did anyway).

 

[tmbrown97]

For those who have been wanting an eye-fi, they're on Woot today; pretty good price.

 

[swaggy]

I had one about a year and a half ago. It corrupted the file system and I could not read the files. I contacted EyeFi support and they pretty much told me to go pound sand. I had to use 3rd party data recovery software to recover 95% of the pictures (daughter's birthday). Maybe this was an isolated incident but their support turned me off from using or recommending their products.

 

[hagak]

Not to lighten you issue with damaged files. But that can happen with any card. Which is why I will never own a camera that does not have dual cards. You get a backup the second the photo is taken.

 

[tmbrown97]

And the advantage with the Eye-Fi is that for most of your shooting around the home, it'll automatically transfers them back to the computer - so it some cases it's safer than a regular card.

With SD cards, good card maintenance is important; after transferring your pictures off, be sure to properly eject, then for good measure, format with your camera after you insert it. All SD cards have a limited number of read/write cycles that they can handle and all will fail eventually.