Eye-Fi Wireless SD Cards Now Available

By Evan Ackerman

Back in 2006, Eye-Fi WiFi SD cards were little more than an awesome idea just begging for some commercial investment to get them into production. And now, they’re here. These brilliant 2gb SD cards contain fully independent wireless software and hardware that will automatically upload pictures to the photo sharing website of your choice (or even to your home computer) via any locally available wireless network. No actual modifications are made to your images during this process (unless you want them resized), and the whole thing is managed at the Eye-Fi website. So, just to clarify, all your digital camera has to be capable of is saving images to a standard SD card, and the Eye-Fi card will work for you. As you might expect, range is not great (well under 100 feet), but power requirements (although unspecified) are supposed to be minimal. As we suggested last year, this means that you may be able to use your SD card as a buffer of sorts, freeing up space on the card as images get offloaded via WiFi. I can’t immediately tell whether Eye-Fi moves or copies files (I suspect it’s the latter), in which case you’d need to somehow be able to figure out which of your pictures have already been transferred. The price for all this convenience? $100 (at least 5x more expensive than a regular 2gb SD), with the software and online services included. Available at most major electronics retailers.

[ Eye-Fi ] VIA [ Sci-Fi Tech ]