Digital Camera Memory Card With Wi-Fi

thefickler writes "A Secure Digital memory card with built-in Wi-Fi networking will allow digital cameras to upload images automatically to home computers and photo-sharing web sites. This product of California-based company Eye-Fi is currently in beta and should be launched later this year. Would you pay $100 for a 2-GB memory card in order to save the hassle of plugging in a USB cable?"

$1.84 per month

[Harmonious Botch]

Assuming that my memory card or my current wi-fi or some other component will be obsolete in 5 years...$100 dollars amortized over 5 years at 4% comes to $1.84 per month. Heck, I tip more than that to have two burgers delivered to the table rather than get up and walk to over to the counter and get them myself.
This is a no-brainer.

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[hamoe]

You could download images and upload ring tones I suppose...

Privacy Risk

[Embedded Geek]

My immediate thought was relabling one of these so it appeared to be a non-WiFi card. Then, if one could handle the software/virus end of it to force the device to transmit stuff without the owner's knowledge, you would be able to observe and/or steal any and all images from a camera or hijack a cellphone that used it, etc.

$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[inflex]

Biggest hate I have with cameras is having to move that card in/out, not to mention stupid events like racing off with the camera without remembering to put the card back into the cam *sigh*, or forgetting to umount the 'drive' etc etc, so yes, a tiny $100 for 2GB is well and truly worth the gains (for me).

Re:$1.84 per month

[Linagee]

Do you really think technology lasts 5 years?

Wifi is highly overrated... I'd rather bt+3g

[dfn_deux]

I'd much prefer an SD card with a bluetooth adaptor built in that could leverage the 3G wireless internet connection which is the true core of the PAN (Personal Area Network) that is always touted as being the logical goal of the bluetooth architecture. I mean really, BT chipsets are far more optimized for power than wifi and comes with far fewer limitation as to the connections it can make. Let the devices choose the path of least resistance to the internet, be it tunnel over a phone, pda, laptop, or whatever the marketplace has in store next.

honestly I think that the working group that came up with BT designed it for exactly this sort of purpose. It'd be stupid not to also use this type of integration between PAN components to further enhance the meta data richness of the content created by the camera. GPS, PDA, camera, 3gphone, and headset sounds like a pretty good recipe for being your own gargoyle. I for one wouldn't mind being able to publish video, photo, sound, and location data at a moment's notice directly to the internet. If we are bound to live in surveillance state I'd sure like to get a good grip on the technology before Big Brother does.

Not the memory card... The device!

[FredDC]

I think it is a great idea to be able to wirelessly transfer data from devices such as cameras. But I think it's the wrong approach to equip the memeory cards they use with wifi. The devices themselves should have wifi capabilities, and I do see this coming in the near future. Equipping memory cards with wifi is a nice way of making existing devices wifi capable but it's not something which will be usefull in the future as more devices become wifi enabled.

Re:Wifi is highly overrated... I'd rather bt+3g

[amorsen]

Bluetooth is so slow it's useless. Headsets need more bandwidth, so you can't get decent bluetooth headsets. File transfer, forget it. Internet access -- even 3G is faster than bluetooth, so forget that too.

Re:Not the first

[The Clockwork Troll]

It is not just a Wi-Fi SD card. It is an SD memory card that transparently and asynchronously uploads all files stored on it to a designated IP endpoint.

About the market

[Yvanhoe]

French cops have a new tactic in protests : when they label someone "troublemaker" they ask him to delete his camera's memory. Wifi could be a way to get around that.

Compact Flash?

[redwoodtree]

God, if they can do this in an SD card, why not a compact flash? Is it just that there's a much bigger market for SD cards?

I have a Nikon D70 and this sure would be nice....

Worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of plugging in your camera every time you want to get the photos off, you get up an plug it into the charger because the WiFi SD card is sucking down the power faster.

Either way you're not gaining anything.

Re:$1.84 per month

[fyngyrz]

Yes, but what value does that $1.84/month give you over a regular 2GB SD card?

It could save wear and tear on the USB connection. My Olympus E20, a 5 MP DSLR, has a tiny USB connection which I sometimes use several times a day. Plug it in, grab the photos, eject the volume, unplug it, go back to what I was doing, do it again. Photography is a hobby; if I were serious about it, I'd use it more.

The E20 is a few years old, and the jack is definitely getting loose, though it hasn't actually had a connection problem yet. It'd be nice to not have to worry about it, and use the jack for less common situations. Same thing goes for card readers. Pull the card, insert the card in the reader, read it, pull the card, insert in camera... wear. Wear and more wear. Plus a remote, but real, risk of ESD problems (High plains Montana.. dry as death during the winter, and even some parts of the summer.)

My E20 has an infrared remote to fire the shutter. When I got it, I thought... I'll never use it. Ooops. I use it all the time. Not only does it allow rock-steady shots off a tripod (no physical contact), it saves wear on the shutter button, allows me the freedom to work more directly with the subject...

I suspect that a wifi enabled camera might be more convenient than we might think. Wifi has a decent range, too, it isn't choked into 30 feet like bluetooth is. So I'd buy this, and I wouldn't doubt for a minute that it would improve my camera experience. Wouldn't it be cool if the camera could just be set to send the images back to your laptop on a continuous basis? By the time you got to it, it'd already have your stuff ready to look at. While you shoot, it uploads. Yummy! Now that I'd definitely pay for. And it's almost time for a new camera anyway. 5 megapixels isn't exactly top of the line anymore...

Hmmmmm.....

[IHC Navistar]

A WiFi-enabled memory storage device?

Jeezus..... Just *how* much easier are we going to make it for hackers to gain access to private data?

If you are so lazy that plugging in a USB cable is just, oh, too much to ask of you, then you pretty much deserve to have your data stolen.

Now we have WiFi memory cards for people who don't want the hassle of plugging in a USB cable. What's next? Doors that don't have keys for people who can't spare enough time to use keys?

Useless. I can understand cameras that are WiFi enabled, but making the memory cards WiFi is just asking for a problem, since the cards are also used for storing other data (documents/files, mp3s, etc.).

Re:Wifi is highly overrated... I'd rather bt+3g

[TheRaven64]

I get about 64KB/s from Bluetooth. I'm transferring a load of pictures from my phone camera with it now. They're only about 3-500KB each, so about a tenth the size of a modern stand-alone camera. It takes a few seconds for each one, but it's very low power and is much more convenient that removing the memory card. I wouldn't call Bluetooth completely useless.

The main advantage of Bluetooth is that it defines a complete protocol stack. I can transfer files from my phone to my computer because they both support Bluetooth; in this case the object exchange profile, although the file transfer protocol is better if I wanted to pull them, rather than push them, from the phone. With WiFi, you need to additionally define a load of protocols on top. Do you use IP (v4 or v6) on top of the ethernet? What do you use at the application layer? SMB? HTTP PUT? WebDav? NFS?

Re:Better Security Cameras

[Cancel-Or-Allow]

A cheap 3.1MP consumer digital camera for under $100 can do 2048x1536.
Now, I agree the real purpose-built security cameras have their place in their 0.6MP glory, but having a 3-7MP camera snap a photo every time something moves could yield a whole heck of a lot more in detail. Might actually get the bad guys caught. Hook it up to a motion sensor, enable the flash, cue up some swanky techno mp3s, then let the burglars have a disco or rave while they rob your place. The more cheap camera's the better!

Do your cameras do this? And can I do it for less than $500 and yield twenty-seven 8 by 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was?
I would like to see some links, cause google isn't turning them up.

Re:$1.84 per month

[curmudgeous]

A multi format memory card reader can be had for $20 to $30 dollars. Heck, you can even buy them as a direct replacement for that aging floppy drive for just a little more. Eject the card and read it directly to save wear and tear on the camera's USB port.

HUGE value to pros

[Slashdot Parent]

I can't see this card being much more than a novelty to your casual point and shooter, but the value of something like this to a pro is enormous.

Let's say you're a pro shooting on assignment (event, wedding, on-location, whatever). Do you know how much money it would cost you if your memory card gets corrupted, lost, damaged, etc.? If it happened at a wedding, your career might be over (most wedding photogs shoot on many small memory cards in case one card gets corrupted. It happens more than you think).

But with a wi-fi SD card, you have instant backup. This is huge! Many pros have an on-site workflow that includes backing up the card the instant it's full. With a wi-fi setup, you can be backed up instantly to a notebook with RAID-1 or something. This insurance policy is worth way more than $100.

I'd even argue for you this would be a great investment. You say that you are prone to losing SD cards. Imagine if the card never left your camera. How many $15-$34 SD cards do you need to lose before you wish you had just bought the wi-fi card?

Re:$1.84 per month

[timeOday]

2GB will still be a fine size for camera memory cards 5 years from now. The mexapixel race has really slowed down, having achieved ample resolution for normal-sized viewing and also approaching physical limits for both sensors and lenses. And once you can store several hundred photos (even approximately 200 RAW files), that's plenty for most people most of the time.

I think there are bigger threats to this product: first, built-in wireless (be it WiFi, bluetooth, or wireless usb) will become standard and practically free; and second, a fixed-size built-in memory might become the norm as the price of the memory falls below what justifies modularity.

Re:HUGE value to pros

[DaveWick79]

That's funny, I see more value in this for the casual shooting.

The article didn't have alot of details, but despite what everyone is talking about here, it doesn't sound like the card has the capability of uploading content without initializing the transfer via software on a laptop or other computer. Unless cameras start being manufactured with support for wifi (and at that point, why not just integrate the wifi into the camera, not the SD card), I don't think you are going to see anything very automatic. I can sure see the value of uploading to the computer before removing the card, though.

Another consideration is the speed. 802.11g isn't particularly fast. If a professional photographer is taking 20-30 shots per minute with a 10MP camera, the wifi might have a bit of trouble keeping up.