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Review by S ILICON C HIP photographer, ROSS TESTER Update: Eye-Fi goes mobile and cloud Back in the October 2010 issue we told you about an exciting new development in digital photography and file transfer. In a standardsized SD card, Eye-Fi combined both photo storage and a WiFi system, so you could move your photos to wherever you wanted without the card leaving your camera. Fast forward to 2014 and Eye-Fi have made a few changes – not the least of which is that they now sell to Australia! T hink about that for a moment: not only was that SD card “standard” as far as storage was concerned but built into the SD case was a complete WiFi transceiver. Just goes to show how ultra-miniature these things have become these days! (By the way, the SD card was bog-standard in size; it didn’t need to be thicker or larger to accommodate the WiFi circuitry or antenna). About our only criticism at the time was that, for reasons best known to themselves, Eye-Fi were not selling to Australia. 36  Silicon Chip In fact, if you ordered a card on their website, it let you get all the way through the process (including entering your credit card details) then came back with a message saying that “they didn’t sell to that geographic area”. Curses! Of course, we took this as a challenge and by using good ol’ Señor Google, found an Eye-Fi reseller who somehow forgot about this restriction and posted our card to us – it only took a week or so from the US East Coast. (Incidentally, since then Eye-Fi has emailed me and address me as a “valued user”. Go figure!). We used that card, very successfully, for the best part of siliconchip.com.au three years. Then, sadly (and not altogenuine 128GB Class 10 SanDisk Exgether unusually for SD cards), it broke. treme PLUS SDXC card from SanDisk I couldn’t access the ‘storage’ section of for just over $250. And I’ve seen 256GB the card any more. SDXC cards advertised (not on ebay!) for The WiFi section still worked perless than $200. fectly but wasn’t exactly useful, without However, our reader’s warning still the camera being able to store the pics! holds good on another point: many, prob(Anyone know what to do with a perably the majority of very high capacity fectly good WiFi card that can’t record Side-by-side, it’s not hard to tell the cards you buy on line (eg, on ebay) and genuine from the fake. But would you more particularly out of China, will not anything?) We tried the various SD card repair remember the differences otherwise? only be fakes/forgeries, they will have utilities and thought at one stage we had a “spoof” utility built into them which struck oil – except that the files were all corrupted! Repeat- fools you into believing they have that high capacity. At ing the process only proved how futile this approach was . . . least that’s what your computer reports. So for several months, we have reverted to the ‘sneakerThere are all sorts of warnings on the net about these net’ system we originally used – take the pics, take the card cards – one we read recently analysed a “128GB SDXC” out of the camera, move it to a card reader on a computer card only to find it was actually a 1GB card with the spoof and move the files manually. utility on it. Even this wasn’t entirely successful: constant removal It’s only when you shell out your hard-earned and try to and replacement of the card destroyed one card (it fell apart) record files that you find the truth. and even rendered the computer’s card reader useless (it One of two things will happen: (a) once you reach the lost its ability to capture and hold the card itself). actual card capacity, no more files will record, or (b) they Fortunately, the original Eye-Fi package included a USB appear to record perfectly but the files will be corrupted SD Card Reader so we weren’t completely stuck. and unreadable. You’ve been warned! By the way, if you want to avoid this nasty surprise, Cards go B-I-G! you’re far better off buying locally and buying a known The original Eye-Fi card was a rather massive (we brand name. You’ll pay a bit more but the risk of losing thought!) 4GB. In 2010 terms, that was quite large. And your valuable files is significantly lower. the fact that we arranged our software so that the pics But even then, some people have been caught with a were deleted once sent to the computer meant that we double-whammy: the “brand name” cards themselves are never looked like filling it. Even a long day ‘shoot’ would forgeries as well as spoofs. If you buy where you can take be lucky to get to even a couple of hundred megabytes. So the card back, you could save yourself a lot of angst. 4GB was way more than adequate. But as you would no doubt realise, memory cards have How do you check a fake? made some staggering increases in size over the last few We know this is a little off the track of our Eye-Fi card years. update but it’s worth knowing anyway! I wrote in an article late last year that 128GB cards had There are quite a number of utilities which will check become available and 256GB cards were in development – the veracity of your card (or USB stick, etc) for you. One and a reader castigated me for spreading false information. we use is “fakeflashtest.exe”, a free download from www. “Anything over 32GB is almost certainly a fake,” he said. rmprepusb.com Perhaps then – but not any more: you can now buy a Just a word of warning: this is a destructive test – don’t Here’s a couple of screen shots from fakeflashtest.exe – they’re the images you really don’t want to see. We were pretty sure the card was a fake, because it caused quite a few errors. Now we know for sure! siliconchip.com.au July 2014  37 Cameras with Built-in WiFi More and more digital cameras, especially (but not limited to) top-end models, are now being fitted with WiFi. Naturally, this means that an Eye-Fi card (of any iteration) is not only not needed but may interfere with the inbuilt system. This review is specifically intended for the (still!) huge numbers of cameras which don’t offer WiFi, either native or as an option. run it on a card with data you want (especially including even an “empty” Eye-Fi card because you’ll destroy the essential Eye-Fi software recorded thereon!). Are big cards really worth it? While we’re digressing, let’s look at using big SD (or any other) cards. If you’re shooting lots of video, you’ll need lots of storage capacity. So a large card is a convenient “gimmee”. But, as we mentioned before, memory cards fail. Either physically (eg, the card falls apart or the contacts break) or electrically (you can’t read what’s on the card or you can’t write to it). We’ve experienced both. In the latter case, there are rescue apps available but they may or may not work, depending on just what has caused the card failure. OK, imagine you went on that extended world trip and had a few thousand photos on the card (and you do tend to take many more photos when they’re digital!) when the worst happens – your card is corrupted. Now you can see why it makes much more sense to use a few smaller cards than one big one. Spread you pics out between several smaller cards – you’d be VERY unlucky to lose more than one. Even a “small” card (small these days!) can hold a LOT of photos. Depending on camera resolution, an 8GB, for example, can hold at least 500-2,500 typical hi-res jpg shots (3-16MB each) while a 128GB can store between 8,000 and 40,000+. Just to put that in perspective (and for the benefit of older readers who still “think” in 35mm film mode!), that atter figure is roughly equivalent to shooting a full roll of 36 exposures every day for more than three years! But now there’s an even better solution We’re back on track – talking about Eye-Fi! As well as themselves significantly increasing their SD card capacity (their top card is now 32GB) Eye-Fi have now branched out into mobile devices. We’ll explain that in detail shortly; in a nutshell it means your pictures can now be downloaded (via apps) to your Android or Apple phones, tablets, etc. house photo studio. When we set this up a few years ago, we thought 500GB would last us for an eternity. We’ve now proven that eternities last about two years! The Eye-Fi card doesn’t discriminate: it sends every picture we take, including oopses and blanks (hey, it happens!) to the hard drive. We’ve arranged it so that the pics go into a folder with that day’s date as the file name. Later we select the ones which are going to be kept in perpetuity and move them into folders more relevant to the subject being shot. We also deleted the mis-shot pics to save disk space. Moving the pics from camera to hard drive is a totally seamless process – the only thing that we have to remember is to leave the Nikon turned on so the Eye-Fi card can continue its magic (it’s second nature to turn the camera off when the studio flashes are turned off . . .) For a more detailed explanation of this process, we refer readers back to that October 2010 article (copies available via our website). But as we said at the outset, Eye-Fi have been busy little bees and have come up with Eye-Fi mobi. Eye-Fi mobi Eye-Fi mobi is different to the X2 type in that it is specifically intended to operate from camera to mobile device, whether that is a phone or tablet computer. Don’t be fooled by the word +WiFi on the front of the card; it won’t work with your home or office WiFi. (You might have noted that it doesn’t have the usual WiFi logo). It operates with Android and iPad devices. The specifications we read said that it required Android 2.3 – our Android 4.0 tablet had no problems whatsoever. If you own a Windows tablet, at the moment you are out of luck (but that may come in the future). Using it is as simple as downloading the Eye-Fi mobi app (either from Eye-Fi or from the App Store/Play Store), running it and activating by entering the ten-digit activation code supplied with the card, then placing the card in your camera and shooting off a few pics. While you’re doing that, the Eye-Fi app searches for (and presumably finds!) the card in your camera, as long as it is within range and that can be up to 14m or so inside, double that outside – and then commences copying the files to your phone/tablet. It really is that easy! While we had a few dramas downloading the app I believe that might have been more to do with the We’ll start with the “traditional” X2 WiFi memory cards of 4, 8 and 16GB formats – they’re the ones we looked at back in 2010. These SDHC cards (note that SD “HC” – the “high capacity” cards may not be backward-compatible with standard SD card readers) use your home or office WiFi setup to almost instantly transfer photos from your camera to a selected drive and/or folder on your chosen computer. For example, here at SILICON CHIP we have a 500GB hard drive dedicated to storing the photos we take in our in- Once the app is loaded, the photos taken on your EyeFi equipped camera are downloaded to your Android or iOS device automatically if it’s within range, You can review and edit them as you wish. 38  Silicon Chip siliconchip.com.au Eye-Fi X2 cards Eye-Fi Mobi specifications Wi-Fi Range: Outdoors – 27.5m, Indoors – 14m Wi-Fi transfer image support: JPEG Wi-Fi transfer video support (under 2GB per file): .mpg, .mov, .flv, .wmv, .avi, .mp4, .mts, .m4v, .3gp Security standards: Improved WPA2-PSK plus static WEP 64/128 and WPA-PSK) Size: 8GB, 16GB or 32GB SDHC Memory, depending on model Speed: Class 10 SDHC performance Read/Write support: All file types, Including RAW* Power: Advanced power management optimises use of camera battery * RAW files cannot be uploaded via Eye-Fi. el-cheapo Android tablet I was using. Later I’ll give it a go with my partner’s shiny new Samsung Galaxy and I’m pretty sure it will behave itself perfectly. I didn’t try loading it on an iPad so cannot comment on the process there – but I have every confidence that it would be just as easy. Incidentally, if you have more than one camera and wish to purchase extra Eye-Fi mobi cards for each one, you can have up to ten cards/cameras synched to the one mobile device. The Convenient All-in-One Solution for Custom-Designed Front Panels & Enclosures FREE Software Only 90.24 USD with custom logo engraving We machine it You design it to your specifications using our FREE CAD software, Front Panel Designer ● ● and ship to you a professionally finished product, no minimum quantity required Cost effective prototypes and production runs with no setup charges Powder-coated and anodized finishes in various colors Proposed Format for KitStop ¼ Page Ad Select from aluminum, acrylic or provide your own material Silicon Chip Magazine June 2014 Standard lead time in 5 days or express ● ● manufacturing in 3 or 1 days Conclusion There is no doubt that Eye-Fi cards cost a lot more than FrontPanelExpress.com an equivalent “naked” SD card. You can easily buy a Class 1(800)FPE-9060 10 16GB Sandisk Utra card for less than $15.00 (rule-ofthumb these days seems to be about a buck a [giga]byte). Remote Control Made Really Easy But that’s like saying you can buy a camera without a The KSRC2 UHF set controls lens for a lot less than one with: nice to look at but not appliances, lighting, scoreboards real useful! & models over 40metres. Its Here you’re buying functionality and convenience. It’s two independent receiver relay nice to have that huge storage on the card but you’re buying Silicon Chip ad 120mmx87mm.indd 1 outputs are rated to 500Watts what the other part of the card can do for you – seamlessly transfer the data. So that ‘extra’ you pay over the standard Fully Special S.C Project Offer!!! Assembled SD card really doesn’t come into it. inc. GST Plus $7.50 P & P The mobi Eye-Fi card does what it does with a minimum of fuss and a minimum of setup. If you want the extra Digital Panel Meters at Analogue Prices functionality of the older, “X2” WiFi card, you’re going to have to pay extra for it – and take longer in getting it going. KSDVM-30 ULTRA-COMPACT The old “horses for courses” adage really comes into it: if 4.5-30VDC Digital Panel Meter you want to be able to transfer pics from camera to mobile device (and hopefully, before too long, to the cloud), the Features: Bright 0.36” Red LED Digits, mobi is the one to go for. If you want to use your home or Snap-Fit Housing, Range optimized for inc. GST office WiFi setup, the X2 is for you. SC solar, automotive and trucking applications. $22.30 $6.70 Plus $4.50 P & P Where from, how much Eye-Fi cards are now available from a number of photographic retailers in Australia at comparable prices to (and in some cases even better than) those you pay on the web, direct from Eye-Fi. For example, the Mobi 16GB eyefi card from Eye-Fi (www.eyefi. com/buy-now) is $AU89.99 with “free” P&P but is available for $74.00, inc GST, from www.camerastore.com.au. However, we’ve seen it for more than $100 – for the same thing – at other stores. So shop around! Eye-Fi’s online prices for their Mobi other models are currently $AU59.99 for the Mobi 8GB and $AU112.99 for the Mobi 32GB. These prices include free standard P&P (prices as at June 2014). siliconchip.com.au MXA026 Fully Assembled Stop-Watch & Clock Six, daylight-visible 60mm Digits Timing Down to 100th sec. Battery Back-up circuit Really easy to use and install. Special Low Price $93.70 inc. GST plus $11.50 post and Pack www.kitstop.com.au P.O. Box 5422 Clayton Vic.3168 Tel:0432 502 755 July 2014  39 11/14/12 7