Part SD Card, Part Wi-Fi

Oh, people too lazy to hook their camera into the USB port?

And too lazy to pull the card out of the camera and stick it in the PC card reader too. . .

The irony is, getting the card working and connected will probably take 10 times longer than it would to simply pull the card out of the camera and jam it in the PC SD slot.

Yes, I'm sure they will be a "forum" on why doesn't this dam thing not connect!

---

"Wi-Fi SD Camera support"

"I can't connect."

"Is your computer on?"

"Yep."

"Does the camera try to connect?"

"Yep. Failed."

"Push the wi-fi button on your computer to turn it off then turn it back on."

"Ummm, let me see."

"Okay."

"Where would that be?"

"Usually above the keyboard on a laptop."

"I don't see anything that says wi-fi."

"Oh, gee. Moron, you have to have wi-fi to connect."

"It connected at Starbucks, jerk!"

"Was it your computer at Starbucks, idiot!"

"Uhh, no. But, I AM NOT A MORON!"

"YES YOU ARE A MORON!"

"A*****!"

-click-

I have to have one! Yet another world class toy!

Looking at the practical side of this makes no sense at all. Pull the SD card out of the camera? Horrors! Plug into a USB port. How mundane. Dazzle your friends by importing the pics from the camera while they take picture. Now that's cool.



Joe

(silly, but cool.)

This i would say is a great invention, but can i get it in SDmini form, or in MD?

last week i was at a bar with some friends celebrating something (more or less just drinking) and i had my camera, was snapping pictures. my buddy goes i need a copy of those pictures before i goto DC... I was like here is the memory card have at it. well i have a MDmini (or whatever its called) and that didnt work in his card reader on his laptop that he had in his car.

now should it have been WiFi that would have worked, although i prob would have had to go out there with him to configure it and that would have taken too much time away from my drinking!

so i say bluetooth all the cameras. bluetooth works great (with macs at least). if my pc had bluetooth and my camera did what a convience. i think they just need to either incorporate bluetooth and wifi in the cameras them selves or make every card bluetooth/wifi too, but either way not everyone has bluetooth/wifi on thier pc. so really this seems like a niche market!

Not a bluetooth camera, but how about a 52-in-1 Bluetooth memory card reader?

»usb.brando.com.hk/prod_d ··· id=00154

Only $25

I really hope they port this to Compact flash.

What good is it for?

Well, Im a professional photographer.. I do a lot of commercial work, and portrait work. I hate having a USB cable coming out of the camera, and usually just load up the CF card..

But, if I could have a wireless card, and be able to see the shots (on a large screen) that I just took, I could work a lot more effectively in both portrait, and commercial venues.

Just being able to get the shots up on the screen as I take them would be a huge leg up.

and again, No.. I cant use USB, i need the system to be wireless. I have wireless strobe triggers, and a battery grip to be able to shoot for hours without "anchoring" to anything.

-Jason

Imagine! You're with family and you're talking pictures. 5 family members are all over you asking to see the pictures in your 2.5" LCD screen... but you're not done taking pictures damn it! So you transfer them wirelessly over to your laptop and let the hounds look at them while you are walking around taking pictures!

You just summed it up. American's keep getting more and more lazy.

It's a convenience. Isn't that what techology is for? Digital cameras exist so we don't have to take our film to the store to have developed. Automatic cars exist so we don't have to shift gears. Cell phones exist so we can be reached when there is no land line available. Sunscreen exists to help us be protected from the sun.

It is a convienence. But in this case I think it's an an extension of a technology where the technology doesn't fit the purpose. We already have a technology that is wireless and is designed for just this type of use. It's called Bluetooth. It's small, lightweight, and works reasonably well. It's plenty fast enough for transfering images back and forth. The only leg up wi-fi has is the range is significantly farther, but how often do you need to transfer images from 100 feet out?

If you were to take my example about the way it should work, then I've got one word for you.

Wedding.

You are shotting at a wedding going uncompressed and high-res You've got a battery back and spare on you so you know you are good but you don't have time to run accross a church or where ever, change the battery on the storage or stop put your gear down, change the stoarage batter and reboot, just plug it in... on the other side of the hall.

Or... Its picture day around the house, a reunion, or unfortunately a funeral (face it for the busy owrld and busy lives its perhaps the only time many families come together) and you are busy running around trying to capture everyone because this may be your only chance for a while. You shoot your shots and some device in the living room captures them, and displays them, lets anyone see what has been taken. You are free to roam wherever and shoot and if you leave this large area (shots outside in back yard?) you sync when you get back.

Another one, you and your friends go to a concert or party. Afterwards you all want to share pictures so you set up your systems to sync and you can walk without worried if them being in their bags is blocking them or if somone stops for a second will you all have to stop, perhaps someone can be on one side of a large place / area and send a picture to the other one somewhere else in the bar.

You have a wonderful even, a new baby, you take pictures, rush down to the visting area where they have free wifi but no PCs, when you are connected you push a button and upload to your photo store, or email a preset account which inturn sends pictures to everyone on the list!

You're shooting at a wedding and going uncompressed and wondering why your camera isn't ready for the next shot when you figure that the camera is trying to send files thru wifi while trying to write back to the card.

Ever tried to read and write at the same time. Its horrible, the smallest batch of files could take ages to transfer and in that time writing to the card could be affected.

Do what most do, fill it up, pull out a new card and keep going.

It's not just americans, it's everybody so don't be poking the finger just at us.

Of course, this assumes that one has a laptop with them that is powered on. Even assuming that though, it would take me 5 minutes to get the USB cable out of my camera bag, connect it to the camera and laptop, and copy all of the images to the laptop. My camera even allows me to keep shooting while connected to the laptop (though I'm guessing it would slow down the camera a bit when it tries to write new photos to the card).

EDIT: Ignore the struck out stuff. I just double-checked and I remembered wrong. What my camera lets me do is connect the cable and instantly go into "PC Connect" mode without changing the dial from when I was shooting. After the images are transferred, I can yank out the cable and immediately resume shooting. (The rest of my argument above remains valid though.)

Funny, it would lock up the camera.

Not quite "lock up", but you're right that my camera doesn't allow for shooting and PC connection at the same time. Memory didn't serve me well this time. I've corrected my post above.

Or to a hacked Zune!

Well, how many times is that going to happen? Like so many have pointed out, why are we so lazy? And to make things worst will I need a firewall on my 200$ digi-cam to make sure my picture don't get deleted by a bored teenager????

For me? Often! Because it doesn't seem useful to you, doesn't mean it's not useful to others.

How about being able to upload directly to a web site/ftp site from your camera using a public WiFi spot so that you don't have to lug your laptop around while on vacation.

$10 bucks to connect?

Or $3 at McDonnald's

Or free at many places. (Las Vegas airport, for example)

Well...think about:

-sending pictures to laptop your "schlep" is using and correcting/emailing images back to editor.

-taking pictures and sending them instantly back to insurer database for claim
(you can say, I can do this with cellphone, but not at quality and resolution, and at cost of celltime)

-the paparazzi are excited!

-my card is full, but I can send these over to my server...

I wonder how much faster the camera battery will drain?

I can think of quite a few things this would be good for.

My first thought was Christmas. How many of us have a bunch of family over? Or lots of kids? Usually we have the entire family over to our house so the kids can open presents, then to the grandparents to open more, then to the next stop and the next stop. Most everyone has a wireless connection and it would be easier to just bounce them off the card and straight to their computers with a simple FTP copy to my server at home. Beat lugging around the camera, a laptop, and a memory stick to do this.

I'm usually taking tons of pictures at my daughters sporting events be it soccer or tai kwon do. So I have to time offloading pictures to my laptop at the right times so I dont miss anything. It would be nice to have to do that and just send them to the laptop via wireless as they are taken.

Sure I could buy several memory cards, but if I can get this for the price of two or three cards and it works, then this functionality would be perfect for me.

What the heck does this have to do with lazy?

Well I had an idea for something like this a while ago, I haven't read the article yet but here was my thinking.

The card would use its memoery as a buffer, and wifi connection would be changed to a computer or a mobile device (basically like a laptop without a screen and major batter life.) and it would send to the device. Therefore you card would have the capacity of whatever was in the storage medium. If the buffered card and wifi could handel it, you coudl record or burst to the end of say... two 160GB laptop drives!

Thats a lot of burst or recroding.

However, never worked on it... but I could work on that storage device!

With Wi-Fi on, this thing will likely be a real pig on batteries.

Ted

Alot are rechargable they mind find this quite useful and wifi if im not mistaken does not take to much power take a photo is 100 times worse on a battery.

Imagine, if you will, the possibilities of a digital camera connected wirelessly to your network. At a wedding, or a bar/botmitzvah. The photographer wanders around snapping pictures. Transmitting those pictures to his assistant who sits in the back corner at a small table with a laptop. The assistant looks over the new images, retouches if necessary and separates the good ones from the bad ones and prints a few really great ones to display during the event. Near the end of the event, the assistant burns some of the good ones to CD ready as a parting gift.

Now... If only they'll come out with a CF version and keep it reasonably priced.

they already have this going on with normal radios.

At first I thought it was another way of making the card do wireless, say put it in an SD adapter and plug into the USB port and get connectivity.

I would not know the type of range you would get with it.

Can an sdcard port even provide pwoer to the card to operate the wifi?

I wonder how much this will cost I wished they posted in the topic or atleast plan to cost.

I've seen it, used it, and submitted an opinion panel on it. If you're a professional photographer (even an amateur), and always taking pictures this saves on having to transfer the pictures to your pc for publishing. Imagine if you were at the gas pump, but you actually had to pump the gas with a handle. See the point?

I am always forgetting to download the camera, would love for it to automatically upload when it had a chance.

Kinda a nice idea if it works.

There is a need for instant photo delivery between the camera and a laptop. It's useful for situations where you MUST have the picture as soon as possible (event shooter), or you just like the freedom of taking pictures and having them sent straight onto the computer in a studio setting.

Similar devices are already avaliable from camera makers like canon and nikon, and here is a pretty good read on it
»www.sportsshooter.com/news/1356

Camera -> fiber -> edit room

At the Oscars, we did just that: sending the red carpet photos back to the edit room as they were shot using the E1a. It was connected via 250 feet of Ethernet, which was extended to the edit room using a fiber line with media converters on both ends, then connected to the LAN and the Mac laptops, a distance of over 1500 feet.

Dan MacMedan shot over 2100 images in a short period of time, and all were sent immediately back to the room without losing a frame. The cards were available as backup, and they have any sound files included that are not sent by the E1a. And when the connection is interrupted, by changing batteries, kicked cords, etc, it starts right up again without having any laptop to reboot, as in previous solutions.

.....

So the bottom line on this first look is that the WFT-E1a looks to be a great, versatile tool for getting files back to an editor either locally or over the internet, but care (and time) must be given to the setup. In a repeating scenario, the setup files can be saved and next usage will be a snap. I'm really looking forward to using the E1a in places that I could never get cards out during the game, etc.

has anyone actually seen one of these work? or is this just vaporware?

LOL, it's funny to see people complain, about being lazy or whatever with this wireless card. it would be handy, and a great product. I wish it was out now... forget 'beta'.

Did you guys (the complainers) say that about the cordless telephone? (not cell, just cordless)... or the IR (infrared remote) for the television?

"I'm not lazy like other people, i like to walk to the phone in the kitchen... i don't need any of this "wireless" fad."

"People are getting too lazy!! Everyone should have to walk to the TV to change the channel or volume.", LMAO...

It never surprises me the amount of useless complaining that goes on in these (or any) forums. (however, there are alot of really good forums here too), ironically, this post could be one of the useless ones, but it's funny none the less.

Maybe the whiners should go back to pen & paper, and throw that (lazy) computer away. Maybe get rid of their cars too, start walking again. lol

While I hear the people talking about the bad use for Cameras, this would be PERFECT for my Treo 700wx.

I mean, a memory card and WiFi in one small package.

-Chris

It seems like a nice tool. Not having to drag around yet another cable is very useful. In 5 years, almost all of our gadgets like phones, pda's, cameras, mp3 players, etc will have wifi, bluetooth, or another similar radio built in. And just think about how small of a card SD and then put wi-fi in it. That is truely amazing.

Could be dangwerous too and end up with stolen images of value...maybe even compromising.

People who don't properly protect their Bluetooth gear are loosing data, phonebooks, etc as well.

Here's a novel idea: Since almost all of our fancy modern electronic devices are able to connect to something wirelessly (cell phone, laptop, pda, mp3 player), why not make the camera itself wireless?

That way, you could still use any card you wanted, and you wouldn't have to worry about whether or not the camera supported the wireless card (remember, they're not computers, you can't just install a driver for it!).

Did anyone notice this bit of the article:

"While the company says this card will work with any camera "qualified by Eye-Fi", there's no list out, so nobody's sure just how many cameras support the functionality."

In other words, probably none, or at least not the camera that you either have or are wanting to buy.

So in order to even use these wireless cards, we have to wait for camera makers to (1) like the idea and (2) start supporting it. If camera makers simply start putting wi-fi INTO the camera then we skip a long, painful step in getting this whole idea into the real world, and like I said above, you can use any card you want (personally, I have four; I purchase them periodically as the prices for the larger ones come down).

Remember 5-6 years ago when almost no laptop had wireless built into it? Sure you could plug in a usb adapter or PCMCIA card, but that was yet another device you had to have carried around with you and plugged in to the laptop. Well, the computer manufacturers figured out it was such a good idea that now 99.99% of laptops have wireless BUILT IN. So if the idea of a wireless transfer from camera to whatever is so good, why not build it in, like we have done with all of our other devices.

Also, as a side note, wireless in a device as small as an SD card, INSIDE your camera... the range MUST SUCK! You would probably have to stand next to your router to get it to work anyway.

Just got this fortune from posting in another thread:

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good."
And one says, "This is new, and therefore better"
-- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"