Eye-Fi wireless cameras

Products: Eye-Fi Pro, Eye-Fi Share Video and Eye-fi Home Video
System specifications:
PC and Mac supported.
Capacity - 4GB.
Image formats - .jpg and (Pro version only) RAW.
WiFi security - static (not shared) WEP 64/128, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK. Apple's WEP TSN not supported.
Range - 27m outdoors and 13m indoors.
SDHC-compatible camera - check here for compatibility.
Website: www.eye.fi
Prices: Eye-Fi Pro £119, Share Video £69.99, Home Video £49.99

WiFi-enabled cameras that upload their pictures wirelessly have been around for at least four years. Eye-Fi cleverly packs this functionality and more into a 4GB SD card, making it available to any digital still or video camera.

The basic Eye-Fi Home Video card will upload still or video files automatically from your camera to a chosen folder - or to Iphoto on Macs. Eye-Fi Share Video adds the ability to post the files to a choice of sites including of Youtube and Flickr.

Niftiest of all is the Pro version that adds the ability to log the global co-ordinates of where your pictures were taken. Or rather it will if you are in places covered by Eye-Fi's geo-location system.

Most of this works quite smoothly. The Eye-Fi card comes with a special USB reader, which you can use to configure the device via a browser interface on a Mac or PC. You can specify different access points your card can talk to, or set up an ad hoc link with a notebook. You can also set the system to upload any new image or video files automatically when you come within range of a friendly access point, though the camera has to be switched on.

If your computer is on, you see the images in a little taskbar window as the they are loaded. If it is off the Eye-Fi will upload files to a server via your router, and pass them your computer when you switch on.

The snag with this is that there is no visual feedback. There is no way of knowing that a transfer has taken place, or how long it took, or thus how long to keep your camera on. Worse, you have to disable the camera's power-saving timeouts to ensure that the Eye-fi is not cut off before a transfer is completed.

Eye-Fi the company is working with some camera vendors to get round this problem, which would not arise in models with built-in WiFi. But having the functionality on a separate card does provide future proofing - Wifi in its current form is likely to be superseded by a more efficient wireless link for this type of task.

Power management is said to impose minimum drain on camera batteries - most of the time the card will be passively receiving data. The battery will take a hit during lengthy uploads but there is a fallback: you can stick the card and reader into a powered USB hub, transferring the data either via this wired link, or wirelessly if your computer is off .

The wired link will probably be quicker, which makes the point that the WiFi will be a refinement too far for most people. But there are many scenarios in which it can be useful - if you work in a studio, for instance, your images can be backed up as you create them.

If you need geo-tagging you should check the coverage maps before you buy. Eye-Fi uses a system from a company called Skyhook, which toured the streets of major conurbations noting the co-ordinates and MAC addresses - that is, hardware IDs - of WiFi routers en route. It relies on these to pinpoint image positions and so is useless in Wifi deadspots.

This essentially cripples the facility for out-of-town use, but within London it worked rather better than GPS. The company claims a resolution of around 20 metres and on a test run it was tight enough to trace a route around a small neighbourhood. But in a large park, away from WiFi, it lost its bearings.

A bonus for the company is that users collect MAC addresses, automatically updating what is clearly a valuable database. The global co-ordinates of images are calculated on the company server during uploads, and then recorded as metadata in.jpg images; the Pro version also supports RAW formats. µ