Eye-Fi Cards and RAW File Support

[Mark Elberson]

Is anyone here familiar with Eye-Fi Cards in general or further more, RAW File Support?

Since Eye-Fi wireless/SDHC combo cards are officially supported in the 5DIII I'd love to hear what people think about the practicality of shooting "un-tethered" in my studio so that images immediately appear on a laptop or iPad. I think this would be great for both me and my clients.

[Daniel Browning]

From a quick search, it seems that only one model (Pro X2) supports raw at all, and it is going to be at least five times slower than a good flash card. But that may still be plenty fast enough for what you need.

[Mark Elberson]

Thanks Daniel. I think for $80 it's a worthwhile experiment. I suppose I could shoot RAW on the CF card and medium or large jpeg on the SD to improve transfer speed. In the field I would use the SD to write backups simultaneously but in the studio it would be really cool to best case transfer RAWs on the fly, worst case transfer jpegs to a viewing device.

[Rocco]

Mark, I have an EyeFi card on the way and just picked up a used ipad2 for a really good deal. From what I can tell, you would need to jailbreak your ipad and install the app MyWi which will give you the ability to set up an AD HOC connection from your iPad directly. Then you can use apps like shuttersnitch to tether without having to include a pc into the mix. Of course, there are ways to set it up so you are tethered directly to your laptop while having the images show up on the iPad as well. I can't wait to experiment myself.

If you end up getting one, keep me posted?

[Mark Elberson]

Will do. It won't be until my 5DIII comes so it may be a while :-)

[ChadS]

I use an Eye-Fi card for work-related stuff. Indeed the Pro is the only line that supports RAW file transfers.

My objection to the card is that there's an uncertain delay until the card will decide to start transferring files (up to many minutes). I'm not sure what's the cause. Maybe it's trying to avoid too much current draw from the battery while shooting.

[Rocco]

Chad, is yours in a cf card adapter? I have read that the top and bottom panels of some adapters cause interference as they are metal.

[ChadS]

@Rocco my camera's just a T2i Rebel - no CF adapter necessary.

[Photog82]

I'm not very familiar with eye-fi cards, but from what I understand it crowdsources nearby known wifi points and gives a general long/lat location. If you're interested in what I do to geotag my photos: I have a Garmin trail hand held GPS that tracks my movement to a trackfile and then I use geosetter to merge the trackfile with my photos. That way I get an accurate reading on the location.