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?"

Comments

$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:$1.84 per month

[iamdrscience]

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

A regular 2GB SD card costs between $15 and $34 (5 year amortized at 4% blah blah blah is $0.28 to $0.63 per month). Essentially the advantage this card adds is not having to get up off your ass and walk 10 feet across the room to get your camera if it's not next to the computer. To me, that's of very little value -- far less than $66-85, especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost. Then again, this is just me, I'm sure to some people with fatter asses than myself this is a value worth far more than the price difference.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Linagee]

Do you really think technology lasts 5 years?

Re:$1.84 per month

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah, but you're going to lose the card after 6 months and $100 amortized over 5 years at 4% is $16.86 per month.

So if you want to use your amortization arguement to justify the cost to your wife you'd better start by buying $60 hamburgers.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Anonymous Coward]

"To me, that's of very little value -- far less than $66-85, especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost."

With a Wi-Fi SD card, wouldn't it mean that the SD card could stay IN the camera, thus avoiding the need to take it out?

Re:$1.84 per month

[Pippinjack]

Just because Harmonious Botch eats two burgers at a time does not mean he has a fat ass you insensitive clod...

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...

Re:$1.84 per month

[tehcyder]

$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.

Now you're just showing off.

Re:$1.84 per month

[F34nor]

In addition what is your oppertunity cost for that?

Or $185 earning 7% compunded annualy is $259 which in 5 years would buy you something 7.5 times faster than a 8800 GTX. Wow NPV and Moores law together forever!

Re:$1.84 per month

[mlush]

Essentially the advantage this card adds is not having to get up off your ass and walk 10 feet across the room to get your camera if it's not next to the computer. . You take all your photos within 10 feet of your computer? I'd suggest your working practices are somewhat atypical...

especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost. Then again, this is just me, I'm sure to some people with fatter asses than myself this is a value worth far more than the price difference. A WiFi SD card would not get lost because it would never leave the camera! If you leave the confines of your house you may find the notion of all your photos being automatically downloaded to a 100Gb protable media player in your bag very attractive indeed. With that sort of setup the main limit on shooting is the number of batterys you can carry.

Re:$1.84 per month

[mlush]

Do you really think technology lasts 5 years? Not a bad assumption in this case, you could easily go through two cameras in that time, but the SD card will not suffer too much wear and tear tucked safely inside the camera. The flash memory may be a bit slow in the second camera but not too bady as were only talking about 2.5 years between cameras.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Type-E]

Another value is live preview. Some dslr like Canon comes with remote trigger which means you can trigger your shot with your computer and review it right away. My stupid sony dslr won't do that and it makes it extremely hard to do product shot: do { 1. Put memory card in 2. take a shot 3. pull card out 4. Stick it to memory card reader 5. review on computer } while (shot is no good); If there is a wifi card, I am sure I can somehow preview it faster.

Re:$1.84 per month

[onetinsoldier]

But for something like a digital picture frame this is perfect. Set p the frame and never touch it again as you stream new pictures to view. Heck you could even setup the grandparents so they would always see the latest pics of the grand kids from anywhere remotely. No brainer indeed!

Re:$1.84 per month

[diskis]

> You take all your photos within 10 feet of your computer? I'd suggest your working practices are somewhat atypical...

Studio work?
Several thousand pictures a day in a single room.

Re:$1.84 per month

[jc42]

| especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost.

A WiFi SD card would not get lost because it would never leave the camera!

Indeed. In my experience, the problem is that USB cables get lost. It seems that nearly every new USB device requires a cable with a unique non-computer-end plug. I have over a dozen USB cables, and most of them fit only one gadget.

Some time back, the USB cable for my Olympus camera hid itself away somewhere for over a month. Looking around on the internet, I found that replacements were only available from Olympus - and the local dealers didn't have them. I ordered one over the Net, and it took a couple weeks to get here. And, of course, a couple days after it arrived, the original cable reappeared.

I'd guess that a wifi-SD card wouldn't have this problem, precisely because it would never leave the camera. The 1-GB SD card in the camera hasn't been removed since I got it.

This seems like a real winner to me. I could forget about yet another unique cable that's easy to misplace. Presumably the wireless would be slower, but when you add in the search time for the cable, it would probably be a lot faster.

Re:$1.84 per month

[mlush]

> You take all your photos within 10 feet of your computer? I'd suggest your working practices are somewhat atypical...

Studio work?
Several thousand pictures a day in a single room. Hmmm... If it were thousands of shots a day I'd have thought that WiFi made even more sense.

Re:$1.84 per month

[anzev]

This comes in real handy if you have a camera that does not have a wireless transmitter or an avaiable component (like the Canon EOS 1D series does, or the Nikon D200 and above).

You see, for us "photographers", when shooting in the studio, it's realy handy to get a GOOD look at the picture on a good, preferably calibrated screen (like... a laptop) but definetely not the in-built LCD.

Assuming that the card will be semi fast, it will allow (at least in part) the photographer, make up artist, model... to see the image and correct flaws. It won't support tethered shooting (which also allows the photographer to see things like focus points, live preview, immediate settings, etc.), but it's a good start. And as far as amater photography goes, it's going to improve the amount of "home made movies and pictures" :-).

Re:$1.84 per month

[jshriverWVU]

I dont think it's designed for people who as you put it are too lazy to put the card in a reader. Even in that respect though, I've had 1 microSD card go bad because I use it for storage on a development machine. So I'm pulling/pushing 20-30x each session (testing, unplug, put back on puter to change software, unmount, put back on dev board). After a while the connectors just get borked.

Besides that, what if you're at a cafe with friends and want to do a live blog update? Or if you're a reporter and want to get that scoop back to the office even quicker, just go to a cafe or McD's and upload to the office. There are many many applications like this.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everyone think that the only point for adding Wi-Fi to a PDA is to be lazy when getting pictures off of it at home. I think most (including myself) will like this card because it will add Wi-Fi to my PDA that never had it, and should have had it in the first place. Namely the Treo. Granted, I do have EVDO via Sprint, but it would be nice to be able to use Wi-Fi when available for internet access, etc...

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.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Junior J. Junior III]

We just had one of our photographers come to us with a 4GB CF card that had failed between removal from the camera and insertion into a card reader. An entire day's worth of shots was lost. Thousands of dollars worth of event preparation, etc. and no documentation for posterity, and a lot of red faces. If we'd had something like this, we could have been beaming the images over to a portable system and made backups.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Idbar]

Isn't better just get a camera with built-in WiFi?

As soon as your 2G are not enough, then what? buy another one?
The memory will still need power coming from the device it is attached to. Why not, just add WiFi to the devices from now on? (Which I think is what is happening anyways).

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:$1.84 per month

[ColdWetDog]

Of course, the professional level camera systems (Nikon, Canon, Hassy, etc) have had Wifi add ons to their cameras for years. BUT, they large, clunky, expensive and hard to configure. If this actually works it has a pretty good future for a lot of markets.

I'd like a CF version, please. And a pony.

Re:$1.84 per month

[sadida_333]

Bluetooth doesn't have to be "choked into 30 feet". Get a Class 1 radio for your computer and a Class 1 radio for your peripherals and enjoy greater range.

From http://www.bluetooth.com/Bluetooth/Learn/

Range
The operating range depends on the device class:

        * Class 3 radios - have a range of up to 1 meter or 3 feet
        * Class 2 radios - most commonly found in mobile devices - have a range of 10 meters or 30 feet
        * Class 1 radios - used primarily in industrial use cases - have a range of 100 meters or 300 feet

Re:$1.84 per month

[thrills33ker]

Did you try to recover the photos? If it was a filesystem corruption (quite likely) then try this on Linux:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8366

I did this on an unreadable SD card and got nearly everything back except some photos were chopped off part way down the image.

Re:$1.84 per month

[TheQuantumShift]

I'm not sure, let me check with my 7 year old Dreamcast and my 12 year old Playstation...

Re:$1.84 per month

[khristian]

You, your neighbour and a lot of other people instantly sharing the pics you took with your camera. That's the only bad thing I found about it (at least I didn't find anything related to that on the company's site).
But there is always someone who will use it, as happens for all new technologies.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Khyber]

And while you pull that card in and out, you run the risk of ESD damaging it. Already did it with a 1GB PNY SD card that was only a month old. It's damaged by static so badly that the only thing that can read it is my external memory card reader. My camera doesn't see the card, my friend's camera and Wii both do not recognize it, nor does my dvd plyer with built-in memory slots recognize it anymore.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Kattspya]

I would say that it's the falling cost of memory that is the greatest justification for modularity. Buy exactly what you need today and get much more memory later for less money.

Re:$1.84 per month

[DaveWick79]

Every camera I've seen that was studio type level uses CF cards. I suppose it would be even easier to build cards like this for CF, since there are already wifi cards using this interface.

Re:$1.84 per month

[fyngyrz]

Get a Class 1 radio for your computer and a Class 1 radio for your peripherals and enjoy greater range.

Computers can't always be modified - for instance, a Mac Mini is pretty much as you get it from the factory. Likewise, a bluetooth memory card isn't likely to be very easily updated with a higher power radio. WiFi, on the other hand, is designed to always have considerably more range.

Re:$1.84 per month

[fyngyrz]

You, your neighbour and a lot of other people instantly sharing the pics you took with your camera

One presumes that you could turn the wifi off, and/or that encryption would be an option. At the very least, you could pull the card out and put in a mundane, non radio one before you ask your significant other to pour chocolate syrup on their (or your) nipples...

Re:$1.84 per month

[triso]

We just had one of our photographers come to us with a 4GB CF card that had failed between removal from the camera and insertion into a card reader. An entire day's worth of shots was lost. Thousands of dollars worth of event preparation, etc. and no documentation for posterity, and a lot of red faces. If we'd had something like this, we could have been beaming the images over to a portable system and made backups. I recommend that you become familiar with testdisk amd photorec, available at http://www.cgsecurity.org/ . If you can read the card with dd then most of the pictures, or other content, can be retrieved.

Re:$1.84 per month

[T-Ranger]

And 15 years ago every studio camera you would have seen would have taken 35mm film. SD is newer then CF. The 3 new Nikon SLRs since August have been SD/SDHC... While they do happen to be the lower end kit, there isnt any reason to think that the upcoming replacements for the higher end stuff won't also be SD/SDHC, given that the theoretically maximum size of the SDHC is greater then that of the current CF spec.

Re:$1.84 per month

[Heembo]

Well, this is at least better than using a card reader - pulling the damn card out all the time leads to excessive wear and tear.

Re:$1.84 per month

[dedalus2000]

this could be good for a reporter working in an area where a camera or media might get confiscated.

WiFi on Cellphones

[FromTheHorizon]

Could this be used to add WiFi to a cellphone with an SD slot? That would be cool...

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[hamoe]

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

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[glesga_kiss]

There are already some SD WiFi cards out there, I'd imagine that the new thing that this one provides is the shape i.e. it fits entirely into the SD card. Existing ones have an antenna or a part that sticks out usually.

The device must support the SD WiFi drivers and last I checked the level of support was pretty limited.

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[duguk]

Yes, you're correct. It is called SDIO. Here's a review for one for PocketPC.

Never used one, but this is the first thing I thought of when I heard of this. Obviously it requires the Hardware, and OS supports SDIO for communication.

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[mgblst]

There are already some SD WiFi cards out there, I'd imagine that the new thing that this one provides is the shape i.e. it fits entirely into the SD card. Existing ones have an antenna or a part that sticks out usually.

The device must support the SD WiFi drivers and last I checked the level of support was pretty limited.

 
Why spoil a stupid theory by reading the article?

No this is no the same thing. In this example, the camera (or any device really) does not need SDIO support, all it need is SD support, which so many things have. It is a way of adding seamless network functionality to any device that has SD, really. You could use it more than just transferring photos.

Re:WiFi on Cellphones

[tokul]

Could this be used to add WiFi to a cellphone with an SD slot? That would be cool...

HP iPAQ hw6945/6925

Security?

[uolamer]

Of course this product seems to provide convenience and has many applications. I just dont see it being that secure, once you take in account of how 'ignorant' the average person is about security. actually it sounds just fine, please start selling them asap, im bored.

Re:Security?

[ettlz]

This is a very reasonable gripe. I've secured my network with WPA-Enterprise, and as far as I know none of those fancy wireless-enabled devices (cameras, games consoles, print servers, etc.) support EAP-TLS authentication (where do I store the certificate?). It's a nuisance.

Re:Security?

[ettlz]

That said, I've just found out some high-end Lexmark print servers do support WPA-Enterprise.

Re:Security?

[Idbar]

Just give one to Paris Hilton. That should entertain us for some days. :)

could be cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially when traveling overseas.

Anyplace with an open network you can archive all of your photos without having to go through a terrible amount of hassle.

True most of the places have card readers, but the rare situation may present itself...

I might think about getting one.

My Wi-Fi

[dotslashdot]

My Wi-Fi is much better with memory than me; that's why I married her.

Re:My Wi-Fi

[JonathanR]

I hope she's got her MAC filter active, else she'll allow connections you might not be so keen on.

Re:My Wi-Fi

[Yetihehe]

You are worst case of computer geek, you've maried access point. ;)

Re:My Wi-Fi

[karnal]

Make sure that promiscuous mode is turned off once married.

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.

Re:Privacy Risk

[billstewart]

I would assume that they've implemented this in the obvious way - make it look like a shared file server with no password on it, so it's easy to access from your PC.
(If not, then it's more trouble to use than simply popping the card into your PC.)

If it is implemented in the obvious way, then yeah, anybody nearby can also read your memory card, upload your pictures, delete them, replace them with viruses or LoLcat memes, etc. (Ise in ur kamera, downloading ur pictur3z) In general, it seems like a bad idea.

Re:Privacy Risk

[ugeook2]

It's not implemented in the obvious way.

$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:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention stupid events like racing off with the camera without remembering to put the card back into the cam *sigh*

How about this, instead of paying $100 for one of these cards, go buy two regular fast 2GB SD cards for $30 apiece. Then put one in your camera to use and one in your camera case as a backup in case you forget to put the card back in. Then use the $40 you have left over to buy yourself a case of beer and drink it while laughing at everybody who is stupid enough to waste their money on an SD card with wifi.

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[Silicon_Knight]

Here's my easy fix to your problem - when I pull a card out, I leave the card door open, and when I pull the battery out for recharge, I leave the battery door open. I've trained myself that right before I grab the camera (usually sitting on a designated spot on a shelf) I visually check the doors and make sure that they are closed.

I also have a DSLR, which I never turn off - I just tap the shutter release to get it out of sleep mode, snap a pic real quick to make sure everything's cool before I go out.

Oh the horrors - a non-technical solution to a technical problem! :-)

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[stud9920]

How about 1) using the camera as a reader so you don't have to remove the card nor own a card reader 2) buy a 8GB card for that price that will make swapping of cards unnecessary

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[Anonymous Coward]

So it seems that $100 is the price of stupidity. After all, your own justification for shelving $100 on a useless product is the extremely tortuous task of INSERTING A SD CARD INTO A SD CARD SLOT! Heck, that's quite a workout. And what about that "oh I easily forget" load of crap? What's there to forget? Take the card out the camera, insert into the computer's card reader, download, take the card out, re-insert into the camera. OMG SO HARD!

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[Fred_A]

This usually isn't done because :

1. : camera USB links (even USB2) are slower than a decent card reader

2. : unless your camera happens to have an insanely high resolution and you shoot RAWs, in which case you probably need *several* 8GiB cards, it's considered safer to have several smaller cards than a single large one so that a card failure doesn't take all of your data with it.

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[inflex]

It's all relative. It's a royal pain (for me) when I'm only wanting to shoot 2~3 shots and transfer them up, check them... perhaps go do another 2~3 shots of another thing. Not to mention the wear/tear on the reader, slots, hinges, plastic etc, of course, you're assuming that my work flow is the same as yours perhaps and if it's not perhaps it SHOULD be?

Justification of a price is relative. We all have things in our lives that are worth more or we're willing to pay a lot more for than others.... let's see, $100 IBM M keyboards (what!? just use a normal one), $400 gfx cards for another 3fps performance, mag wheels, low profile tyres, rear wings, how about cellphones with a myriad of 'features' which one has to find uses for just to 'justify'.

Get over it people, for some people $60~$70 extra is small change to pay for making life easier in an aspect of life that one finds annoying when spread over the life of the device.

Now, I'm going to go play around with my network cabling because this new fangled wireless stuff is just a waste of money for people who are too lazy to plug it in.

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[ColdWetDog]

Or you could do what most of us photographers do...

1) Have a couple of spare cards. Take the used one out, pop the new one in. [create system to keep track of which is which here]

2) Have a spare battery. Take the used one out, pop the new one in.[create system to keep track of which is which here]

Personally, I get the heebie-jeebies when the flimsy little doors to my various cameras are open. I like everything tucked in.

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[ColdWetDog]

...it's considered safer to have several smaller cards than a single large one so that a card failure doesn't take all of your data with it.

Reasonable people will disagree with that statement (as, I suppose, will unreasonable people). Billions of electrons have been shipped back and forth discussing this on various photography boards. You have two camps - one, who like you, suggests that it's safer to not leave your eggs in one basket and have several smaller cards. And the other (like me) who has found that in over 50,000 exposures, I've not lost one file to card failure but have had several close calls by misplacing said card (they all look alike you know) or dropping said card on some unfriendly surface or into something wet (like the washing machine). Personally I prefer to change cards in the comfort and privacy of my own home. YMMV.

Re:$100 for 2GB --- absolutely

[Fred_A]

I don't really have an opinion on the "cards going bad" meme (never had a card go bad either). In my case though, I have at least 2 cards by camera so that I can dump one in a slow travel reader while still using the other. I never lost a card either, being very paranoid with them (might still happen of course).

Better Security Cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

It there is an easy way to trigger the camera into taking a picture, then maybe you could make a security camera system that had better resolution, auto-focus and etc, than the incredibly crappy cameras used in most systems.

Re:Better Security Cameras

[zcat_NZ]

Or you could just buy a high-resolution network camera specifically designed for the job

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:Better Security Cameras

[Molochi]

What's the point? All you'll catch are hippies in a microbus dumping trash on your property.

Re:Better Security Cameras

[zcat_NZ]

Would you settle for a 1.6 megapixel 802.11g/WPA2 wireless camera that can do 12fps full res or 30fps full-motion mpeg4 at 800x600?

http://www.axis.com/products/cam_207mw/index.htm

Would I buy? No.. But it's still neat!

[coryboehne]

I have a HP laptop, most of the newer laptops have card readers built in, so it's eaiser for me to just slap the card in that it is to mess with the wireless connection..

Still, neat idea overall, just not useful to me, might work with my palm lifedrive quite nicely though.... hmm..

Answer to market research question

[Compuser]

I would not pay $100. A 2 Gb SD card costs 17.50 today on pricewatch
not counting sales and rebates that happen occasionally bringing the
price down even more. So I would pay a bit extra, perhaps $20 for
a wifi version. HTH.

Re:Answer to market research question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but would you pay $100 to never have to pay for another SD flash memory card again? That's what this card is really offering.

Re:Answer to market research question

[Zebedeu]

I would pay for it.
Hell, I would pay 100 just for adding the Wi-Fi functionality to my camera.

One of the things I'm really lazy about is connecting the camera to the USB port on my PC. I don't like taking the CF card out because 1) it's basically the same amount of work, and 2) I've heard that sometimes the pins in the camera can be bent during insertion.

In essence it's the same reason why I like to have bluetooth on my cellphone for synchronization: you're just sitting there and synchronize without having to reach for the device or the cables (ok, so maybe you would have to turn on the camera).

Re:Answer to market research question

[Anonymous Coward]

sarcasm/ This makes perfect sense as new technology should be cheap as it is first introduced. /sarcasm

Maybe after this is fine tuned and a market actually opens up then yes, you'll see a much cheaper version but until that time don't compare to the standard which doesn't offer anything close to new market technology that has the chance to change interaction between many devices. You're worse that the corporate execs. telling the engineers to build some that's "lighter, faster, cheaper, more effiecnt, and for less money".

Check out the Microsoft surface video. If I had one of those (@ $10,000 a pop that won't be anytime soon) then a Wi-Fi card would be amazing. But until that time comes I can only hope all of this technology becomes more efficient and over time it will be cheaper.

Selective market

[Devil's BSD]

Assuming I'm reading this correctly... there already is a market for cameras with built-in wifi. Canon has a few models; one that comes to mind is the SD430. Nikon also has a few models. Even Kodak has an SD-sized Wifi adapter. I am also aware of adapters for professional high-end cameras, i.e. the Canon WTF-E1.

It's a selective market because not everyone will be able to take advantage of the full benefit. If you are a corporate photographer, for example, it might be nice to be able to have your photos automatically uploaded to your network share as you snap photos at board meetings and whatnot. On the other hand, I don't think Wifi will do you much good on your African Safari trip.

All in all, this article is just another slashvertisement. Just another company probably trying to get the word out about their new product - hardly anything revolutionary. The market already exists, it is a niche market, and no, I will not be paying a hundred f**king dollars for it.

Re:Selective market

[Anonymous Coward]

on your African Safari trip.
The only safari the average slashdotter goes on is to the fridge.

Re:Selective market

[Grimbleton]

If you looked at the average /.er's computer room, you may find that an African Safari is rather tame in comparison.

Re:Selective market

[Zebedeu]

Yeah, but have you seen the price on the WTF-E1? It costs more than my current digital SLR!

I think I can imagine why it's called "WTF" -- It's the first thing people think when they see the price.

Re:Selective market

[wumpus188]

It's Canon WFT-E1, not WTF-E1. They are not that cool.

Re:Selective market

[jrumney]

Assuming I'm reading this correctly... there already is a market for cameras with built-in wifi.

Right, and assuming I'm reading it correctly, that market just got expanded to all digital cameras that use SD cards as their storage medium. Previously a camera had to have the WiFi built into the camera, or support SDIO (or the Compact Flash equivalent) and have the drivers and probably some form of UI built in.

Eye-Fi

[Burpmaster]

Does it download porn directly into your brain?

No but I would to have Skype on my Treo 650

[F34nor]

Adding wifi to phones means the end of of paying for cell/mobile phone service in the home and even in wireless MANs. Lots of phones have SD varients. There are two SD cards on the market already that have wifi and one apparently has memory as well. Although they are not supported by the treo unless you hack it. Go Shadowmite go.

Re:No but I would to have Skype on my Treo 650

[Barny]

Check out the nokia e65 for a nice voip 802.11g compatible phone, or if you have too much money the n95 :)

Re:No but I would to have Skype on my Treo 650

[F34nor]

I'm currently in the Middle East and my wife has a Nokia e61 that hasn't been crippled by some slack jawed cell phone company exec. I have been running pbxes.org with Gizmo project for sip Voip goodness. Although since I updated the phone that setup has not worked and I have not tried to figure out why. In the meantime Fring came out and now she can just use Skype on the phone. Its rough sometimes but it works. The sip was always fantastic. Now if I could just get her stupid employers to get off the goddamn browser based authentication life would be simple.

Speed is an issue

[Rolman]

Given the size and power requirements for SD cards, I think we can safely assume it's going to be limited to 802.11b speeds for data transfer.

That means a theoretical maximum of 11Mbps (actually around 7Mbps maximum throughput), which is hardly enough for real-time photo transfer in cameras with a resolution higher than a few megapixels (with compression) and that automatically rules out any professional usage for this thing.

Even if it somehow managed to achieve 802.11g speeds, it's just around 20Mbps throughput tops, so still nothing to write home about. Maybe 802.11n would be a little more interesting, but I really doubt it'd be feasible.

Anyhow, it's a nice hack and maybe a great geek toy to impress friends. It may even be cool to integrate with an app in your PDA or smartphone, or enable printers to support it, but it's useless for anything more serious than that.

Re:Speed is an issue

[imsabbel]

Well, how about thinking before dismissing it?
It isnt just a wireless adaptor, it also got 2Gbyte of memory.

This means that if, for example, you shoot raw with 10 Mbyte of filesize (which is quite typical), you can take 200 pictures.
If you are in a studio (or whereever else you have wifi),now every 10-20 seconds, one of them will be transfered away, freeing up that space.

It might last quite a while that way.

Re:Speed is an issue

[iGN97]

This is true. Also, consider the other things taking time in a studio situation. Most professional strobe systems take at least half a second to recycle. This means you can pretty much forget firing bursts in a studio situation.

Also, in a burst situation, you actually have two caches taking the hit before the wifi-part, the in-camera memory and the memory on the memory-card. So I would think this combination would happily accommodate most real life extreme burst situations. Maybe what the original poster was really looking for was a video camera.

This actually sounds like a great device, and I'll definitely get one of they make a CF-version compatible with my Canon-gear.

bluetooth?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be that bluetooth is just as common as WiFi, and would be easier to use for the average person. Since getting a camera phone with bluetooth and can now send the (not so great quality) pics direct to my comp - any comp with bluetooth - suddenly I am always annoyed by my digital cam everytime I have to dig around to find the USB cable.

This would be great for underwater photography.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my biggest problems with taking underwater pictures is the hassle of taking the camera in and out of the enclosure in order to get the pictures off the camera. Usually my battery life is good for 2-3 outtings but I'd really hate to run out of space on my memory card.

Now if only they would incorperate this AND the charging without a cord technology that pops up every couple of years and I'd be all set. Cutting down the risk of flooding your digital camera UW would be worth the small price bump to me.

Re:This would be great for underwater photography.

[coryboehne]

Good story about wireless power x-fer done by MIT the other day on /.

Maybe, just maybe..

Bah, I don't need no USB cable

[MelloDawg]

My SD card has USB built-in:

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1853)-SDSDPH- 2048-SanDisk_Ultra_II_SD_Plus_USB_2GB.aspx

This solution seems alot simpiler than Wi-Fi: no SSID/WEP/WPA/etc stuff to configure.

Funny, people are usually more impressed by my SD card than my new Nikon DSLR.

Re:Bah, I don't need no USB cable

[nsebban]

I bought mine without being too sure it would be a good product, but it ended up being an amazing SD card. I'm surprised the built-in USB hasn't become the de facto standard in SD, seeing how usefull it is.

I don't see the point of adding Wi-Fi to a SD card. It takes 2 seconds to plug your digital camera to a computer (or a TV). And seeing how Wi-Fi lacks security, I don't want this new thing to become a standard :/ I know I wouldn't buy one, may it be for $100 or even cheaper.

Re:Bah, I don't need no USB cable

[Slashdot Parent]

Funny, people are usually more impressed by my SD card than my new Nikon DSLR.

Well, can you blame them? Sorry, I had to slip that in there. Nikon makes great cameras.

But imagine this. You are a pro, and you take 150 shots on a corrupt SD card. I'm pretty sure at that point you'll be kicking yourself for not shelling out for a $100 wi-fi SD card that would have given you instant backup to a notebook sitting in a corner somewhere.

Re:Bah, I don't need no USB cable

[Black Perl]

But imagine this. You are a pro, and you take 150 shots on a corrupt SD card. I'm pretty sure at that point you'll be kicking yourself for not shelling out for a $100 wi-fi SD card...

I'm pretty sure if it was the $100 wi-fi SD card that was corrupt, you'd be kicking yourself too...

Re:Bah, I don't need no USB cable

[Slashdot Parent]

Nah. For a pro, the photos are always worth way more than the hardware. Otherwise, you wouldn't be pro now, would you?

You can always buy a new card. But if you missed The Shot, then you have big problems.

Re:Would I buy? No.. But it's still neat!

[JonathanR]

...palm lifedrive... You mean this is a real product name? Does it get hairy with overuse?

Just the thing for protests

[Anonymous Coward]

where cards and abuses often disappear

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.

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

[juhaz]

But it would be completely useless in a stand-alone camera. 64KB/s + 2GB card == NINE HOURS.

I don't know about you, but that is not exactly something I call convenient. Even if it weren't a full card, we're talking about a minute per picture here, and that's just too slow.

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

[jrumney]

That's kiloBytes per second, not bits. Bluetooth 1.1/1.2 has a max transmission speed of 721kbps (roughly what I get from my HSDPA 3G connection in practice), hence the 64kB/s the GP sees (the rest of the bandwidth is taken up with error correction and other overhead as with any other wireless connection) Bluetooth 2.0 supports an enhanced rate of 3Mbps, so if both devices support 2.0, performance should be better.

Bluetooth 3.0 is where this technology will become a realistic alternative for everyday use, with UWB supporting speeds up to 480Mbps, putting it in the same ballpark as USB 2.0 high speed.

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

[juhaz]

That's kiloBytes per second, not bits.

Thanks, I'm quite aware of that. It takes nine hours that little fact included.

It'd still be hour and half at 3Mbps, not including the overhead, which is, needless to say, too long. So yes, it would take 3.0 to become reality, but we'll see about that when or if it happens.

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

[Perfectstar]

It's interesting that you mention this scenario. I'm not sure if anyone has made the connection yet, but the first thing I thought of when I read this article was Microsoft's Surface project. With built-in Wi-Fi and Bt (2nd or 3rd gen. assumed), it would work with either protocol.

Which makes things very interesting, indeed; I'm imagining photos being displayed on the 'Surface' in (near-)real-time, or the card being popped into some SD-but-cellular-net-only smartphone and having all my appointments synced in -- again -- (near-)real-time, even if I'm away from my computer. Or, how about social sharing? You and your friends take off for a hiking trip, snapping pictures along the way. Everyone's smart-device or laptop could have all the photos beamed to their toys wirelessly. All without cables. That would be nice.

And, as someone pointed out above, $1.90/mo. is a pretty fair deal.

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

[dfn_deux]

You are making a straw man argument. If you are using a PAN which includes a 3g handset then you are bringing the network with you. As such, photos could be uploaded on the fly. So unless you shoot in contnuous mode and hold down the shutter button to intentionally fill the 2gb of storage you wouldn't be waiting "9 hours" to transfer your photos, the photos could instead be transferred seamlessly in the background.

If you are able to get a sustained 64kBps all the way from your camera to your webhost you will not be posting in 100% realtime, although you'd be damn near it and I'd also say it is unlikely that most people would be shooting over 2GB of pictures in any given 9 hours stretch. The bottle neck in nearly all cases will be the photographer, not the transfer speed.

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

[owlstead]

"Bluetooth is so slow it's useless."

From an article on Radio-Electronics.com: "Of all the features included in Bluetooth 2, it is the enhanced data rate (EDR), facility that is giving rise to the most comment. In the new specification the maximum data rate is able to reach 3 Mbps, a significant increase on what was available in the previous Bluetooth specifications."

Most new devices come with BT2 as standard. My new laptop will surely have BT2, it's nicely enough for stereo headphones and at 375 KB/s (around 300 KB/s after anti-collision etc I suppose) there should be very little reason not to use Bluetooth. It uses much less power and might be able to talk to handsets as well. Huge bonuses over Wi-Fi if you ask me. The question is if it is a strong enough signal without strong antenna.

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

[Poromenos1]

Bluetooth/3G? So I could either transfer the files from my camera VERY slowly while being in a 30 ft radius of my computer, or pay up the wazoo to get them through the cellular network to my pc. This is useless to me, I would much prefer this WiFi card, especially if it used SCP or some kind of encryption. There's an open access point in every neighbourhood!

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

[amorsen]

It uses much less power and might be able to talk to handsets as well.

I doubt power consumption really matters. My Nokia E70 sucks juice like crazy when bluetooth is in active use, whereas I haven't really been annoyed by its power consumption when accessing stuff through Wi-fi. The difference in power consumption can't be hugely in bluetooths favour in practice, or it would have been noticeable. 3Mbps is barely enough for UMTS anyway, so it's basically obsolete before it gets off the ground.

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

[owlstead]

Call me when you hit 3Mbps on a UMTS connection, would you? This is a shared medium, and I don't believe the 3 Mbps for a second. Even if you go over 3 Mbps, I would still have a 3 Mbps connection to my laptop. Since I won't be downloading Blueray disks over Bluetooth, that will be ample, and thus far from useless. Things only get obsolete when people stop using them; Bluetooth is therefore far from obsolete. Many *cars* nowadays come with Bluetooth standard.

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

[juhaz]

Uh, no, I'm extrapolating from a personal experience. As are you.

If you are using a PAN which includes a 3g handset then you are bringing the network with you. But I'm not. Most of the world doesn't have 3G coverage, go anywhere outside a major urban area and there goes your 3G (yeah, who wants to shoot nature anyway, concrete hell should be enough for everyone!). Huge swatches of areas that do can have relatively expensive data transfer rates, given a typical 3-4MB JPEG it would cost about 5 EUR for me to transfer just one picture, now this is obviously not a data contract, it's no-frills talk-is-cheap one, and there would be insanely cheaper alternatives if data transfer were the primary purpose.

But let's just assume the coverage is 100% and free, so we can move on.

So unless you shoot in contnuous mode and hold down the shutter button to intentionally fill the 2gb of storage you wouldn't be waiting "9 hours" to transfer your photos, the photos could instead be transferred seamlessly in the background. Now look who's building the straw men. Given the 3.5MB pic, it would take almost exactly a minute to transfer one. That's JPEG, RAW's are maybe 2-3x larger. Taking a shot more than once a minute (much less three minutes) is hardly "holding down the shutter button in continuous mode for no purpose other than to waste space". And of course there are quite a few times when you actually DO need a burst, for real reasons.

and I'd also say it is unlikely that most people would be shooting over 2GB of pictures in any given 9 hours stretch. The bottle neck in nearly all cases will be the photographer, not the transfer speed. Then you don't have very much experience about enthusiastic hobbyists or professional photographers. I can easily fill a 2GB card in three hours, and that's an amateur with a point&shoot, DSLR would be a lot faster (people often do take dozens of shots in few seconds with them) and make much larger files.

Yes, I'm sure you're right in that there are many people for whom it would be enough, I'm certain it wouldn't be anywhere near enough for me, and I'm quite confident I'm not the only one.

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

[dfn_deux]

Look, you are missing my whole point. IF you shoot 2gb at a time, THEN BT becomes the bottle neck and THEN you are probably not the type of person that this device would be useful to. However, many people would get plenty of use out of this technology AND many people do have unlimited 3g data AND live in areas with coverage AND don't care if their phone is transmitting for minutes-hours after they are done shooting. Just look at the popularity of camera phones... Think about the number of people who aren't shooting huge photos on DSLR cameras and want to take snapshots... I was simply pointing out that, in your previous post, you were taking the worst possible scenario and using that single handedly to try and create a false dichotomy wherein you propose that the only use you have for a camera would preclude the usefulness of a BT PAN including a camera and therefore would make it useless. However, as someone who does regularly take photographs and sends them over a 3g connection, I am saying that I (and I'm sure many many others) would certainly be a consumer of this technology.

Also the first part of your second post is going on about shooting in nature and not having any 3g coverage... Well certainly there is more 3g coverage (in my country at least) than there is area covered by open wifi access points. And if you are shooting through 2GB cards in 3 hours I'd bet dollars to donuts that you'd be best served by having multiple cards and doing a "traditional" transfer to local for postprocessing and forgoing the entire wireless transfer scheme altogether....

Your initial argument reads like one of the pro hybrid car arguments where they base the maximum range of a car on the presumption that it starts with the batteries fully charged. It is a true statement, but it is being made about a situation that is generally atypical. Using that as the crux of your argument is the straw man I was calling you out on...

This next part might come out like gobblydegook since i'm just doing it as I'm going along...
So lets split the difference and say that the average digital camera user falls somewhere between your example and what I say my typical usage is. Instead of 3.5MB per photo of your DSLR or my 1.25MB point and shoots we'll call an average picture 2.4MB. And your 3.5MB pictures fill a 2GB card in 3 hours, lets call that 195 photos/hr while my highest rate, while on vacation and taking waaay more than more normal rate, I clocked something like 30/hr at most. That gives us an average of 112 photos at 2.5 MB each per hour. Now you gave an estimated speed of 3.5MB per minute for BT+3g which is 210 of your DSLR photos per hour or something like 9.7 hours to upload 3 hours worth of photography, or 6.7 extra hours of uploading after shooting. I OTOH would take 54 hours of shooting at my stated rate/resolution to shoot 2gb and would have been uploading at faster than realtime, my card would never hit capacity as long as I had a signal and/or enough memory on my phone to cache the data (coincidentally my 3g handset has 2GB of addon memory and 64MB internal). So our theoretical "average" photog would take 4.6 hours to shoot 2gb worth of photos while uploading at about 70% of realtime incurring a 30% time to upload penalty...
Well, not sure if that math holds up... maybe i'll make a spreadysheet or something... but for now I'm gonna go enjoy dinner ;)

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:Not the memory card... The device!

[jc42]

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.

In a sane world, you'd be right. But in the world we live in, most small devices such as phones and cameras are "locked" by their vendors and can't be made to work sensibly with any remote device not approved by the vendor. This isn't about to change soon.

However, many of those devices now accept SD cards as memory devices. This makes for a method of remote access that the vendors can't lock out: The SD card itself communicates with remote devices, without the knowledge of the phone, camera, etc. This makes it possible for independent software developers to add capabilities in a way that the device's vendor can't block.

Even if the devices do all get wifi capability soon, we'll likely find that, as with cell phones, the builtin wifi is "locked" as usual and can only talk to the vendor's servers. This will mean that there will still be a market for wifi-enabled memory cards, to do an end run around device vendors' blocking.

This goes right along with the original reason for the why the original ARPAnet was developed (and evolved into our Internet). The US military was fed up with the ways that vendors of electronic comm gear blocked communication with competitors' gear. They funded development of what at first was an independent "IMP" box that plugged into other gadgets and translated their protocols to/from a device-independent protocol (that evolved into TCP/IP). Eventually this scheme migrated inside the devices, especially computers that had the power to run the protocols.

But all along, the Internet has needed ways to plug devices into gadgets (often routers or gateways) that implement TCP/IP, because the vendors haven't seen fit to allow general IP traffic. This is what we see right now in the telephone market. The industry has converted almost entirely to VoIP internally for wired links, but is doing all they can to block end-to-end VoIP so that they can charge monopoly prices for their specialized gear. And the cell-phone market is even more blatant, supplying IP to phones but locking out access via any but their own servers and disallowing VoIP services.

We can expect that most wifi-enabled cameras will fit this pattern, and won't allow general TCP/IP connections. But this article demos that the Internet approach still works here, in the form of a plugin "memory" device that implements a general IP connection on the side. This approach has worked for 40 years, and it's still needed due to the obstructionism of manufacturers and vendors. There's no reason to believe that this situation will change any time soon, so wifi-SD cards may have a long life ahead.

Re:Would I buy? No.. But it's still neat!

[coryboehne]

...palm lifedrive...
You mean this is a real product name? Does it get hairy with overuse?

Yes, if by hairy you mean occasional complete drive failure..

I have absolutely NO idea why palm thought it was a good idea to use a mechanical hdd rather than a solid state memory card, sometimes I really wonder about engineers.. sigh.. Fortuneately they did replace the unit's drive for free and within about a week...

Security

[4D6963]

I don't mean to sound like I'm trolling with FUD, but knowing how secure WiFi is, can't this be a privacy issue? For example, couldn't one access data on your SD card by WiFi?

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

If the device actually gets a Wi-Fi certification from the Wi-Fi alliance, it will support WPA2-PSK, which, assuming a decent Presharedkey, is more than secure enough for the home user.

Re:Security

[phorm]

From what I understand it is intended to do an upload through wifi upon taking a picture, not to be accessible as a network drive itself. Since the connection is uni-directional in that sense, most likely the main concern would not be somebody gaining access to the camera-memory via wifi, but rather interception of the wifi upload.

Re:Security

[4D6963]

Good point, thanks. Have this imaginary Informative mod point ;-)

No more tethered shooting

[dalesc]

If you're working in a studio, having a laptop on a trolley on the end of a USB cable following you around is a common set-up these days. Seeing a picture on a decent laptop screen can show problems a digital camera screen hides - particularly what's in focus and what's not. But even with a long USB cable, tethered working is restrictive.

If this gives the advantages of tethered shooting without the cable, I'd buy one in an instant.

Re:No more tethered shooting

[plaxion]

Actually, connecting via a cable is not that common at all as there is already a way to transmit images via wireless for professionals using Nikon or Canon equipment.

The purpose of transferring the images in this manner is to 1) eliminate the time involved downloading cards (time is money) 2) allow you to double check exposure and white balance on a color managed device (your environment is color managed I hope) and 3) allows your assistants to get to work on the final images before you've even finished shooting.

If you're using this because you need to check what's in focus after you take the shot, I suggest you work on your basic skills.

combo cards?

[xonicx]

nice to see some combo(IO+Memory) cards going out of lab. Don't assume that these cards will fit into any kind of camera. camera should support SD host spec 2.0 and driver should support combo cards. It will take time to see SD combo cards capable cameras.

I was a beta tester

[evw]

I used a beta version of the product and really enjoyed it. I thought it was at its best in a "digital party" social scene. It's a lot of fun snapping pictures at a party and having them immediately uploaded where they can be displayed on a big screen and shared with everyone.

The version I tested could be configured (using a computer app while the SD is mounted) to automatically upload to Flickr, Phanfare or a long list of other photo sharing sites. I believe they also had a version that would upload to your PC but I wasn't testing that.

Setup for the card was done using a PC. The camera is oblivious to the WiFi capabilities. On the plus side the card can be configured to connect to any of the networks that your computer knows about. On the negative side, I think you need the computer to add new networks.

Re:I was a beta tester

[garcia]

It's a lot of fun snapping pictures at a party and having them immediately uploaded where they can be displayed on a big screen and shared with everyone.

I use a mobile device and am uploading pictures almost immediately to my own gallery where ever I am. I need to have E/GPRS and the camera's image quality sucks. For me to be able to upload the same photos to my gallery from nearly wherever I am (with wireless available -- which in this day and age is fairly frequently) would be sweet.

That is EXACTLY what I'm looking for. For the commenter that it's a "selective market", I can't disagree more. It's just that people aren't accustomed to that kind of ability and obviously aren't aware of the advantages.

Re:I was a beta tester

[atkulp]

If you are into the "digital party" social scene, you might be interested in an app that I'm working on for creating a slideshow from images as they appear in a folder (great for projecting). It's for an MSDN article (read: free) and it would be good to get it in a few peoples' hands. Let me know if you are interested. Thanks! -Arian

Not the first

[Bretai]

Not much different than this Wi-Fi SD card

It's gonna be hard to offer security with no user interface on the camera, and I wouldn't use it without that. Once most cameras offer built-in Wi-Fi, these little gadgets - although cool - will be overpriced and obsolete.

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.

Re:Not the first

[jrumney]

What you posted a link to was an SDIO WiFi card. Such cards are commonly used in PDAs and in this case printers to give them Wifi capabilities. They require SDIO support in the device and drivers. TFA is about a 2Gb memory card, which has onboard Wifi and the software to use it to transparently upload files to a server. To the device it appears as a 2Gb memory card, not as an SDIO Wifi card.

Re:Not the first

[Gordonjcp]

It's gonna be hard to offer security with no user interface on the camera

Don't configure it from the camera, then. Plug it into an SD card reader and configure it from your PC. It just needs to have a file on the card with the WEP key and SSID (or WPA if you feel like being lulled into a false sense of security).

Re:Not the first

[munrom]

or WPA if you feel like being lulled into a false sense of security. I was under the impression that WPA & WPA2 was actually fairly tough to break if you had a large enough passphrase

Re:Not the first

[brianosaurus]

If they are, it just makes it that much harder for you to know what the memory card is actually doing on its wifi connection.

Maybe its sending spam when its done uploading all your pictures.... somewhere.

Maybe instead of posting to Flickr, it actually sends your pictures to a server someone that the company selling the card (I didn't RTFA... sorry) controls, at which point they forward it to Flickr. It would definitely allow them to support many, many more photo sites in the future. Way more convenient than trying to perform a firmware upgrade on the wifi card on your memory card every time a new photo album site pops up with another new upload method. So I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that's how it works. Seriously. Imagine trying to debug why the magic wifi client inside your mother's camera isn't uploading pictures to her Flickr account when you have access to neither.

I wouldn't put one of those things anywhere near my stuff. Not without tcpdump running.

Security isn't always about key size.

Re:Not the first

[edittard]

Am I the only one who doesn't like the idea of my files being transparently loaded anywhere? Call me a luddite but I'd rather have that under my manual control - I assume this isn't possible as the camera would have to provide the controls/UI.

Re:Not the first

[Gordonjcp]

Way more convenient than trying to perform a firmware upgrade on the wifi card on your memory card

You're still missing the point. It's a memory card. You put it in a card reader and copy the new boot image across. Now I don't know if that's how they're doing it, but that's how *I'd* do it. Perhaps the card could be partitioned into a data and a system area, with the system area holding the config and boot file?

Re:Not the first

[Anonymous Coward]

So if we know what the IP is, we can walk around town and get pictures uploaded from everyone else's camera?

Re:Not the first

[jc42]

Maybe instead of posting to Flickr, it actually sends your pictures to a server someone that the company selling the card controls, at which point they forward it ...

This isn't a new concern. I'm remembering the kerfuffle a few years back, when customers discovered that msn.com was using material (mostly images) from customers' web sites. When challenged, MSN pointed out that the EULA explicitly stated that any files uploaded to there servers were the property of MSN. After a bit of publicity, they backed down. But in the followup, it was pointed out that 1) the language was still in the EULA, and 2) many other ISPs have similar language in their EULAs.

So before buying one of these, we might want to find out whether the card automatically sends the pictures to the vendor's servers any time it was within range of a usable wifi access point? And would this constitute assigning copyright to the vendor?

This isn't a hypothetical legal situation; it's the actual legal situation with a lot of "private" network use right now. At least, it is until the courts settle the question of whether such EULA terms are enforceable.

Re:Not the first

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need to know the IP, all you need to do is hold ALT+F4 while unplugging your modem wire. I will display the IP of the last person you tried to connect to.

Re:Not the first

[agileinfosystems]

Why this Wi-Fi SD card too costly And what is the maximum capacity of this card.

Re:Not the first

[SeanAhern]

I believe it is under manual control. If I'm reading comments correctly, you configure the card (through an interface on your PC) to upload to a user-specified IP address.

Re:Not the first

[edittard]

How does that help? There could be hundreds of access points with the same IP address, especially if the factory default is 192.168.X.Y

Or...

[BooleanLobster]

... surf the net with your camera!

I can't wait until they make an eggbeater with a built in webcam. Or a BlueTooth-enabled flashlight.

This reminds me of the marketing guy talking to Dilbert: "It has to have a 47'' screen and still fit in a purse or wallet. It has to act as a communications satellite as well as an air freshener. It must cure deadly diseases and whiten your teeth while you sleep! AND IT HAS TO BE CAPABLE OF TIME TRAVEL! AND HAVE A TELEPATHIC USER INTERFACE!"

Re:Or...

[gsn]

Or a BlueTooth-enabled flashlight.

Ask and ye shall receive
http://www.campustech.com/c/campust/33086.html

or I suppose you could be one of those people who uses their cell phone screens as flashlights.

Where does Wi-Fi belong?

[gaelfx]

1. If I do buy this, I am still bound by the *painstaking* task of deleting all those crummy photos I end up taking of my finger or the back of the head of the asshat who walks in front of the guy with the camera. Isn't this worse than actually taking out the cable, plugging it into the camera and plugging that into the computer? 2. 2GB for a professional photographer is not going to cover very much, however, I'm sure a professional could afford several of these happy little battery eaters. The question, however, is this: How many MAC addresses can a professional photographer set up so the mystical fingers of the wireless router can grab his photos? 3. Apparently, cameras with Wi-Fi built-in haven't yet seized the entire market of digital cameras yet. So how on earth is a memory card with this capability supposed to succeed where a much simpler solution has supposedly failed? 4. Who else can access this SD-sized Wi-Fi cards signal? To whomever gave these people 5.5 bills to develop this junk: I have this great idea for transferring electricity without all these cables, if you give me ten-million dollars, I'll develop it for you....What's that?....Sure, it can power a light bulb.....(maybe).

Re:Where does Wi-Fi belong?

[seegar]

Sorry to kill your $10M dream, but wireless electricity is already here.

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.

Re:About the market

[ArsenneLupin]

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. And here is another solution.

Re:About the market

[Twanfox]

Why attempt recovery that may or may not be possible when you can have the pictures already saved elsewhere? Also, what happens if, by some stupid abuse of power, they simply take your camera to ensure it's deleted? You might not be able to recover anything after they get done with it.

Re:About the market

[Eric in SF]

Ding!Ding!Ding! This is exactly what I was excited about. For street photographers or photographers who happen to be shooting the police beating someone, this is an excellent first step.

Unfortunately, it sounds like you have to scope out your area FIRST, to find and configure any public wifi networks onto the card, but it's only a matter of time before they will auto-connect to any open wifi connection.

Once you've got the connection, it's a lot harder for the cops, (or worse - private security guards) to take your gear away and delete your pictures (or have an evidence technician "destroy" the card while "investigating" it). They've all been automatically uploaded to a server outside the reach of your local legal system!

If they come out with a Compact Flash version AND drop the price, Nikon is going to crap their pants. Nikon sells a pricey wifi add-on for their pro cameras that was just rendered obsolete.

Yeah, I'd get one for parties - my D80 takes SD.

Re:About the market

[Chuffpole]

So, once they know they can't rely upon asking him to delete his camera's memory, this just means that everyone gets searched more thoroughly and any other wifi-enabled devices will get close "attention" too. Great.

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....

Re:Compact Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just add one of these (SD to CF adapter) and you're all set:

http://www.amazon.com/Premiertek-Card-Compact-Flas h-Adapter/dp/B000NVD1ZW

Re:Compact Flash?

[iamdrscience]

I would bet it's mostly that SD cards have a larger market share, but there are also practical reasons why it would be less useful on a CF card. I mean, the places where CF is used instead of SD are generally stuff that needs faster data transfer -- wireless is slow, a little slow for a 2GB SD and a lot slow for CF. I mean, I'm assuming this uses 802.11b, you're going to get at best ~6Mbit/s -- a quality CF card can do like 40Mbit/s so that's a huge hit.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that there are a lot of compact flash cards available that are bigger than this 2GB card -- an 8GB card would take 3 hours to transfer at 6Mbit/s compared to less than half an hour at 40Mbit/s (and a CF card might be even faster in reality).

Re:Compact Flash?

[monkini]

SD cards fit any device that uses a compact flash card with a relatively cheap adaptor plus the ever growing sd card format. In the world of digital storage the compact flash card is a main frame in a world of laptops.

Re:Compact Flash?

[redwoodtree]

Both excellent replies! I didn't even think of an adaptor.... thanks!

pfft...

[djupedal]

My Nikon S6 has done this for this last year... SD & WiFi & 3" LCD - I can even control it from the computer.

GREAT NEWS!

[TheBearBear]

I've been wanting something like this . Also, I wish there was a camera out there that comes with functions that lets it automatically take a photo at X time, repeat Y times at Z intervals. That would be great for time lapse shots. Or with the wifi link you can remotely control the camera!! Is there one like that out there? Or you can sync 100 of these cameras and place them in a row and let them take a snapshot at the same focal point, .01 seconds apart!

Re:GREAT NEWS!

[Archon-X]

This also does the trick!

http://www.amazon.com/Canon-TC80N3-Remote-Control- Cameras/dp/B00009XVA3/ref=sr_1_1/104-4601399-93479 55?ie=UTF8&s=photo&qid=1181645140&sr=1-1

Geology field trips

[fantomas]

We're currently testing the Ricoh 500SE for geology students' field trips, wandering around sand quarries, mountain areas, with wireless networks to connect them back to base or over the internet to a field studies centre. Last year's project here. So would be of interest to us. Right now we're looking at ruggedised kit for tough environments but we're working towards coming up with a generic solution that could help schools and universities build their own off-the-shelf field trip kit. So a card that could be fitted into the school's own more standard digital cameras would be great. The last thing you want to be doing in 'the field' is popping open cameras and fiddling around with tiny cards, all sorts of comedy potential for the cards to get lost in the mud/sand to get into the camera etc. Wireless beaming the data back to a laptop in the school bus parked down the road or straight back to the field studies centre, a much nicer solution indeed.

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.

I'll buy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...ever had your terrorist activi.... oops protest march photos deleted by the police? No problem any more - "O.k. Mr. Officer, I'll delete all the photos. See, I'm formatting the card and fill it with photos of the pavement so the photos of your squad beating up peaceful demonstrators is not recoverable. I'm sorry for the trouble caused."

Canon Digital IXUS WiFi. 2 years ago?

[bronney]

Linky

What in ze hell?

What I am missing in digital cameras

[PMBjornerud]

What I would pay for, would be a standard approach for digital cameras to use Bluetooth to share pictures with other cameras nearby.

As it is, when taking group pictures, either everyone needs to get a picture taken with "their" camera, or someone needs to email everyone afterwards. It would have been really nice to have a feature to just share a picture you just took with everyone* else.

It's really easy to show people your pictures as you go on a digital camera. What I want, it for it to be just as easy to share them.

*Strangers and passersby excluded from accessing your pictures, obviously.

Re:What I am missing in digital cameras

[Fred_A]

Urk, a camera Zune, just what we needed...

Re:What I am missing in digital cameras

[PMBjornerud]

A camera zune would delete the pictures on the third viewing. Without DRM, it's a sound idea.

Great if camera is in inaccessable place

[Anonymous Coward]

Your missing the point of this. If your camera is on a tall pole above you or dangling from a kite or balloon or just perched on a ledge somewhere you can trigger your camera by the remote or a radio release and see the resulting image instantly on the ground on your laptop/pda to see if it has taken correctly. No more taking your pole/kite shots, bringing the camera down and then finding out you missed a shot and have to repeat it all. For a 100 dollars this would be great.

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:Hmmmmm.....

[jubei]

The whole point is to simplify making your data public, posting to the web. Your argument is a non-starter.

Like the old Sandisk 256MB + Wifi SD card?

[pelago]

There was a 256MB SD card from Sandisk which also included a Wifi adapter, which was useful for Wifi-less PDA owners. Is this going to be similar?

That's Cheap

[tacocat]

If you consider Microsoft's Surface is $5,000 so you can place a camera on your table and have it move photos around...

Considering the cameras are starting to do blue tooth on their own, not sure that you need all that much more for moving files around. But who ami I? I'm not a marketing dick, I'm just Joe User when it comes to interconnecting devices. It's awfully convenient that all the devices are now starting to use a single common form for USB connectors -- means I only really need one cable for everything.

Surface

[HUKI365]

Have I missed a comment or is the future that the Microsoft Surface was aimed at? Devices, all types, have easy access Wi-Fi interfaces. Simply brilliant.

A complete waste of time(IMHO)

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been said quite eloquently this is pretty much a complete non starter. Many cameras have this or something similar already.
I think this is a gimmick, pure and simple. It has limited novelty value and that all. The transmission speed is going to be rubbish. Far quicker to change the card and have it downloading while you are taking the next set of piccies...

Disclaimer, I use a Nikon D2Xs and a D200. I have the ability to send pictures using a mobile phone connection. The press snappers I work with use it all the time. In my dept(features) the speed of getting the pictures back to the office is not so urgent so I have only used it a few times

I do wonder how many people use this sort of facility on consumer digital cameras? My guess is pretty small.

One thing which has not been mentioned (AFAIK) is that using any form of data transmission from the camera can be a big power drain. Many cameras don't have the battery power to do this much. Pro Cameras and their users always have spare batteries and memory cards ready for use. The average Consumer probably does not have this.

If you are just too lazy to swap memory cards then please give up photography...

Digital cameras

[hummassa]

My old HP digital camera lasted for three years until I found that the battery life was substandard so we needed a new camera. So, instead of $2, you can put $4 dollars/month and it is still a bargain.

Insert...

[Bayoudegradeable]

Insert racy backdoor joke here...

Re:Insert...

[SierraPete]

or the obligatory Man in the Middle vulnerability...

Heck yes -- or no!! depending on security

[CodeShark]

As a sometimes professional photographer, I would use this in a heartbeat if and only if the wifi card can be 100% secured to a PC that I bring to an event. Because then I really don't have to worry about running out of memory card space -- I just have to confirm that the wifi upload is working properly. Which leads to a "heck yes" response

But if the card isn't secure enough to insure that no-one else can pick up the WIFI transmission and basically pirate my digital work right out of the air, then heck no.

Like many things Slashdot... more info required to judge the goodness or badness of any technology....

I would pay it

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you pay $100 for a 2-GB memory card in order to save the hassle of plugging in a USB cable?"

Yep, without even blinking an eye. I've been wanting wi-fi on my camera for years. But for Canon camera it's a major add-on (~$1000 US) and only available for their high end SLRs.

Ditch the USB cable?

[SpiritGod21]

Considering I lost mine, I very well might.

Not useful

[yohanes]

The SDCard with WiFI is useless because:

1. To configure this device, you need to connect it with a computer
2. You cannot selectively upload photos
3. You can not control a camera with this (unless they try to sell this technology to camera makers, to specifically support their SD card).
4. You can not make your ordinary camera to be come a network camera.
5. You can not browse the web with this technology (unless ..., same with point 3).

It is useful to automatically backup any shot that you made, in case someone grabs your camera (if they only asks you to delete the files, then it is recoverable using PhotoRec).

Re:Not useful

[Leonard777]

Obviously not familiar with details of design capabilities. 1. the SD functionality would work just fine, the WiFi would obviously have to connect to a computer.. that's kind of the point. 2. Says whom? Have you read the tech specs on this card? Selective upload is most certainly an option. It could be handled from the PC side very easily. 3. That's hardly the point or intended use as I can determine it. 4. Why not? This sounds exactly like what they are designing. 5. I would not want to browse the web an a 2 inch LCD. That's not the point. The point is long range, high speed data transfer and connectivity. As a few have mentioned, new and upcoming technologies like the Microsoft Surface and others are using WiFi and Bluetooth to communicate securely with devices. Ideas like this one would allow older cameras that may not have built in WiFi capability to utilize these new technologies! I think this is a great idea!

2 gig is fine - it's just a buffer

[Lemming Mark]

2 gig is just fine. It'll store a lot of photos after all. But imagine a different way of using this kind of system: carrying around your laptop / PDA (or even an iPod / Zune with wifi) whilst taking lots of pictures. It stays in a low power state and just wakes up every so often to stream pictures off your camera. You'd never get the "out of memory" errors at a critical point, because your memory card is continually being emptied. Does that make the 2Gig sound worth it? If you could get the device to hook up to any nearby wifi and securely transfer the pictures back home for storage, that would be cool too.

And that's not to mention that as soon as you come home your camera can start syncing your photos before you've even taken it out of the bag. And this shouldn't really even stop you from plugging the camera / SD card into your computer if you're too impatient to wait for the wireless sync!

Side note: my guess from the article is that this device has some kind of "built in" file transfer mechanism and doesn't export itself as a wireless interface to the device it's plugged into. But if it did, it could make the GP2X a whole new level of awesome!

I don't know exactly how this gadget is intended to work, but I would suggest people should consider all the things it *could* do before they get too upset over the prices.

Not really....

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a professional photographer, and I have used the Canon ad-on for doing this for a couple of years. I love it because:

1) in studio, I can check lighting, exposure, etc on the computer immediately w/o pulling the card, copying the image, etc. And my assistant can constantly check things as I work to make sure nothing get fubared while I am working (i.e giant dust spec gets on sensor when changing lenses, model gets a shiny spot on her skin, etc).

2) I don't have to use a runner when shooting sports to carry the chip up to the pressbox for transmission to the bureau. And my assistant can constantly check things as I work to make sure nothing get fubared while I am working (i.e giant dust spec gets on sensor changing lenses) and with the 2-way radio, he gives me feedback on shots from the pressbox.

3) Shooting anyplace I think I might get hassled, the laptop goes in the trunk with a car battery and a wi-fi router with external antenna is turned on. So if some rent-a-cap busts my chops or some moron (like WTC cops) tries to delete images, no problem.

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: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.

Re:HUGE value to pros

[Slashdot Parent]

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.

Well, this beta tester made it sound like the photos could be automatically uploaded to a PC, Flickr, Phanfare, etc.

Unless cameras start being manufactured with support for wifi

Already been done. But most wi-fi add-ons cost way more than $100, and if your camera doesn't have wi-fi at all, well, now you don't need to buy a new camera.

Another consideration is the speed. 802.11g isn't particularly fast.

The fastest SD cards max out at 8MB-10MB/sec write speed. 802.11g has a theoretical max of 6.75 MB/sec. So if we figure 4MB/sec (typical write speed of a consumer-level SD card, by the way), is shooting RAW (~15MB file size for 10MP on my Pentax K10D), and shoots 30 shots per minute.

It would take about 4 seconds to write each photo over the wi-fi network, and the photographer is backed by a 2GB buffer. Will the photog be able to sustain his shooting rate of 30 frames per minute? Well, for a 4 hour wedding, he will generate 7200 photos at that point, and surely be fired by his client for taking so many goddamn pictures that they have to sort through.

A typical number of wedding photos would be in the 750 range. So, can the wi-fi network handle 750*15=11250MB of traffic in 4 hours? It could handle that traffic in 2812 seconds=47 minutes.

Looks like the smart money is on the network keeping up.

Re:HUGE value to pros

[DaveWick79]

I was kind of considering the practical max of 802.11g, which usually is about 20Mbps, which works out to about 2.5MB/sec. You are right, with a 2GB buffer I don't suppose you would have any trouble keeping up unless you were taking an insane amount of shots.

My point on the automatic transfer is that you've still got to have the PC as the intermediary. No direct communication with Flickr, etc. because the Camera is oblivious to the wifi.

Wear and tear?

[Slashdot Parent]

Wear and tear?

I've never heard anybody complain of wear and tear on a USB cable before. I guess there is a first time for everything.

As for wear and tear on the shutter release button, I would think that your shutter itself would fail before the release button, but what do I know?

Anyhow, if this card is ever released, I will buy one for sure. If anything, to solve the "I don't feel like waiting for 2 GB of images to download over USB" problem. With this, there would be no waiting. The images would already just be there.

For pros, this would be a godsend. Totally eliminates the issue of taking 150 photos to a corrupt card.

Re:Wear and tear?

[fyngyrz]

I've never heard anybody complain of wear and tear on a USB cable before.

You still haven't. I was talking about the connector on the camera: "The E20 is a few years old, and the jack is definitely getting loose..."

As for wear and tear on the shutter release button, I would think that your shutter itself would fail before the release button, but what do I know?

The E20 uses the shutter button to pre-focus and to snap. It gets used many more times than the shutter itself does; every time you look at a subject, you end up pressing that button, unless you use the manual focus, which I don't, because the camera's "eye" is sharper, and faster, than mine. The remote (of which I have several spares) moves the wear (and the stability issues) off-camera. Also, just FYI, I have lots of older gear with cranky buttons that otherwise works fine. This ranges from a clock radio that has an iffy numeric keypad to a high end stereo with heavy mechanical latched mode selectors that have become unreliable.

The only saving grace for the E20 is that I will probably abandon it before it abandons me, because the tech in this area moves extremely fast. Right now, I can't decide between the Foveon/Sigma RGB per pixel technology, or the classic (and I use that word loosely) Bayer sensor tech in cameras like the Canon line; the very high luma resolution of alternating sensor filters speaks to me, but then again, so does true RGB fidelity. Such choices to have to make. :-)

Re:Wear and tear?

[quenda]

> If anything, to solve the "I don't feel like waiting for 2 GB of images to download over USB" problem. With this, there would be no waiting. The images would already just be there.

huh? I think you'll find that USB is many times faster than WiFi.

Re:Wear and tear?

[Slashdot Parent]

huh? I think you'll find that USB is many times faster than WiFi.

I won't dispute that USB is way faster than wi-fi, but I will assert that it doesn't matter in the slightest.

First of all, USB is not the bottleneck, the read rate of your SD card will be the bottleneck. Most consumer SD cards have a read speed of about 5MBps, which is a little slower, but still comparable to wi-fi speeds.

Secondly, none of that matters, because the wi-fi card will be transferring those photos to your PC while you are still shooting. By the time you are ready to start organizing and retouching, if you used wi-fi, the photos are already on your PC. If you use USB, you have to transfer those photos, which I guarantee will be slower than "the photos are already on the PC".

In other words, your comment was technically correct, but utterly irrelevant. HTH. HAND.

Re:Wear and tear?

[quenda]

> Secondly, none of that matters, because the wi-fi card will be transferring those photos to your PC while you are still shooting.

Its sounds like you and I are making a whole bunch of different assumptions. I don't
expect there to be free, open wifi around where I'm shooting.

I like the idea of it automatically uploading to the PC when I get home,
or the laptop in the hotel if I'm on holiday. But the power needs for wifi
are way too high for this. It should be bluetooth. If you want to see the lot right
now, then USB.

Realtime video stream application

[Anonymous Coward]

One could read the stream that appears in the destination drive, and encode it directly to a ffserver.

Big Picture

[monkini]

labels on the card tout 802.11g 54mbps, this is 6.75 MB/second (if my conversion is correct). or about a picture a second uncompressed, four or five with jpeg compression I am guessing at real world speeds of about half that (i have no idea). This is pretty awesome for a first generation wi-fi card that will revolutionize, yes REVO not EVO, picture sharing. Remember Wi-Fi, "who would ever need that , it's stupid, I can plug in my laptop without buying a stupid card for $70" 100gb hard drives "I will never fill my 40gb drive, that's crazy" $100 bucks for wireless uploading and sharing from nearly any camera, this could be huge. For most users, this card will last beyond the life of the camera and likely the next camera. I know the cell phone is expected to fill this role, but, with a transmission "tax" and for the foreseeable future, crappy pictures regardless of pixel count. Potential problems: unit is battery sucking pig, real world transfer speeds suck, problems getting it to work with wi-fi hot spots. Or some weird legislation that I can only imagine at this time.

Police?

[phorm]

I remember when several articles were around discussion police misconduct - especially in regards to how they treated onlookers with cameras - that there was a suggestion that a camera with wifi and/or a bluetooth/cellular connection would be very useful.

If a bad cop doesn't like you taking pictures of him beating up some dude in the street, he can try to confiscate your camera etc etc. If your camera has already uploaded the pictures/video to a "safe house" server, then the pictures will survive even if your camera doesn't.

Re:Police?

[freedomlinux]

IANAL- but I am a photographer and a law student. While your concept could be implemented to move pictures to a server while you continue to shoot an ongoing event, your exact scenario is quite unlikely (at least in the US)
Considering that it is legal in the US to photograph virtually any police activity, as well as the lack of expectation of privacy on a public street, you have two options:
Blatantly refuse to surrender your property. If the police officer would arrest you in any way, he has no standing because no criminal or civil offense has been committed.
Surrender your property, while calmly stating that you do not wish to surrender the property, but will do so involuntarily at the behest of the police officer. Immediately contact a police official to file appropriate actions, which may include the return of your property including images, disciplinary action, and court action against the officer, department, and/or other suitable entity.

Also, the wireless connectivity could be a lifesaver when you must continue shooting and ongoing event immediately, but have lost the USB cable or other adapter.

Re:Police?

[fyngyrz]

Blatantly refuse to surrender your property. If the police officer would arrest you in any way, he has no standing because no criminal or civil offense has been committed

But he can, and will, arrest you anyway. That's reality. And you won't necessarily get your recording back if it depicts police wrongdoing, or anything else they think you shouldn't have.

Surrender your property, while calmly stating that you do not wish to surrender the property, but will do so involuntarily at the behest of the police officer. Immediately contact a police official to file appropriate actions, which may include the return of your property including images, disciplinary action, and court action against the officer, department, and/or other suitable entity.

Right. Same thing. Chances are you won't get your recording back. It'll be "lost" or "accidentally" erased.

People are arrested all the time for the most ridiculous things; and their property is taken and "lost" (see "Va. Tech photographer detained, equipment confiscated" on linked page) on an ongoing and continuous basis.

You can characterize the practice any way you want, but the bottom line is the police have the power, and they're not reluctant to use it, especially when they might be in the wrong. They're following the lead of the rest of the government, which has also accrued huge amounts of power without underlying authority, and isn't the least recalcitrant about using it. As a law student, you should become quite familiar with this; it all revolves around the constitution. Of course, as a law student, the odds favor you becoming a tool of these people, sad to say.

Re:Police?

[freedomlinux]

Granted, there may be 'accidental' property loss or damage, and yes, the police might arrest you.
Considering that 'arresting' does not even mean anything other than being detained for any period of time, you may very likely be arrested. Arrested does not in any way mean charged or convicted of anything.
If you are arrested, there is nothing you can be successfully convicted of, and it just opens the police department to liability.

Wireless Camera Memory-Driving

[HTH NE1]

This is great. Now I don't need to confiscate cameras from people for taking unwanted pictures; I just hack their camera's wifi and erase the pictures without their knowledge! Bonus, I get to download whatever personal pictures they have stored on the camera. This will be great for surreptitiously profiling people by the contents of their cameras at airports, too! ("No guns, no toy guns, no pictures of guns or toy guns permitted beyond this point.")

Re:Wireless Camera Memory-Driving

[SparkEE]

I realize that you were aiming at funny, but I think you may be on to something there. When I saw the headline, the first think I thought was "Why wouldn't they use bluetooth?". It just seems more appropriate for a camera, and more secure.

But after thinking about it for another few seconds, I realized why I would buy one. I could probably give my WiFi on my phone, assuming I could get/write the drivers for it on the phone.

Re:Wireless Camera Memory-Driving

[SparkEE]

Okay, bad form here replying to my own post, but, here I go anyway to try to head off the replies before they start....

After writing the above, it soon became obvious that they wouldn't have used bluetooth because of the much lower bandwidth. At least, that seems like one good reason to me.

Re:Wireless Camera Memory-Driving

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact of government can look at your personal pics comment was modded "FUNNY"
I think it's not funny but alarming... Big Bro doesn't give up.
To act accordingly with my concerns I'm posting as anonymous coward

Re:Wireless Camera Memory-Driving

[Distortal]

Bluetooth doesn't have much of a range on it, limiting its usefulness.

If this allows a remote machine to browse my memory card then sign me up. 2-3 times a year I have to walk around an event taking pictures while my partner sits at the laptop printing them out. If I could get the images to her without physically returning to the laptop every time, things would be much easier.

My only worry is the effect it has on battery life.

Sure, I'll buy one...

[drinkypoo]

...if the card is smart enough to connect to any open AP and dump the contents to an online server every time I take a picture, or as soon as an AP comes within range if there isn't one when I'm shooting. Otherwise no.

I see no advantage

[curlynoodle]

When I use my Nikon, I am rather often hiking, fishing, skiing, or just strolling about the city. After taking a few snapshots, I eject my SD from the camera and load it to my PDA, or at home laptop, to copy the images. Done, seems simple and more cost effective to me. Why is there a "distance" between a person's PC and his or her camera that must be closed by radio (even Bluetooth)?

Also, from where does this device get power? From the camera? A device that already drains lithium AAs in a flash (pun intended). So if a camera sits idle in a bag or pack, the radio is always ready for transfer? No thanks.

I see no advantage to this device, none. If someone else does, please describe a practical scenario.

Re:I see no advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

I shoot photos each year around Christmas time where we print the photos out on a decent inkjet photo printer with the option of getting the photos on a CD. This is a 100 times better than the polaroids some people take of the same subject(s) at the same types of stores.

With wi-fi on camera I could get the camera un-plugged from the laptop and have someone else print and burn CDs while I shoot pictures.

This isn't a highend, professional setup. We're handling 2-5 subjects every 15 minutes. Shooting 4-15 photos, taking the best one or two and printing them. People love the instant gratification of a pretty good photo and the ability to take the entire set of photos on CD if they want.

But being literally tied to the laptop sucks. I've got to keep it and the printer right next to me and without much room, I've got to handle the camera, show the photos taken on the laptop, print them out and possibly burn them.

No my only problem would be finding someone competent and quick enough to trust with printing the photos out correctly and burning them...

Bateries consumption?

[Anonymous Coward]

Essentially the advantage this card adds is not having to get up off your ass and walk 10 feet across the room to get your camera if it's not next to the computer.

For me the USB cable is not something I use, since my Camera (D70) is USB 1.1, my 2Gig card eats the battery when being transfered. I imagine a Wifi would be similar.

I do not see any real advantage to use Wifi, since when a card is full I am usually far from home or any computer / network. I bring 3 cards when starting a journey.

When I am ready to transfer I need to sit at my PC anyway for selecting/editing/publishing. I just have 3 tiny cards when I sit, insert them into the card reader, no camera to plug-in.

Just my 2 cents.

Now when the police yank your camera...

[italbrew]

you can still get the possibly incriminating pics since the photos will be in your buddies backpack across the street. Prediction: police will start jamming wifi.

Re:Now when the police yank your camera...

[Craig Davison]

Mod up. That is the real benefit to this device. Now you can surrender your memory card without losing any of your photos.

Useful as immediate backup of photos

[pjp6259]

I just recently got back from a trip, where one day my CF card failed in the middle of the day. I had been making backups each night of my photos, so luckily I only lost the photos from the first half of that day. But it got me thinking - the way cameras work now, unless you backup after every picture (a time consuming and unrealistic idea), you are always going to be at risk of losing your photos from a CF corruption.

I thought of two possible solutions:

1) Have a camera that holds two CF cards. This was a DSLR camera (meaning a fairly large body), and CF cards are small and cheap, so why not have a camera that takes two cards, and writes in parallel to both of them?

2) Have a wireless connection that after each pic, sends the data to an off camera storage. If you can do this wireless, it seems it should be trivial to have redundant off camera storage that are both served wirelessly. I don't know if this new technology quite gets you to that point, but it's a step in the right direction.

Power?

[Ben174]

How is this thing powered? Is this going to be another thing I have to worry about keeping charged?

Would I take one?

[LordVader717]

Heck yes! It wasn't too long ago that I spent 80$ for the privilege of having the inconceivable amount of one gigabyte of space.

Chicago in '68 and Rodney King.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

News coverage of the "police riot" in Chicago in 1968 swung a presidential election and its fallout causes a sea-change in US politics that affects things to this day.

This was the result of a technological change: Chicago police were used to suppressing news of their activities by smashing the newsies' cameras. That convention was the first major deployment of the early "minicam" - a massive, just-barely-man-portable, over-the-shoulder TV camera with a backpack full of support electronics capable of relaying the image to a truck within a couple blocks, which could then relay it to the local studio.

Result: Not only did smashing the camera do no "good", the image of the oncoming billyclub might be on TV screens across the nation before it actually hit.

The Rodney King debacle was a similar quantum leap: This time it was due to the availability of videotaping cameras inexpensive enough to be common even in the inner city. Now police behavior could be videotaped by ordinary citizens and passed on to the press. California's response to the issue was to make it illegal for citizens to tape them "in the performance of their duties" - letting them seize the cameras and tapes in future incidents.

This product potentially gives individual "watchdogs" the same capability that the TV networks got in 1968: The ability to take a picture and have it safely out of the camera - into a laptop around the corner, relayed onto the net, or whatever - before the instrument can be confiscated.

As a $100 plugin for a range of standard cameras.

Would I pay that much for one? Hell yes!

Yeah -

[VariableGHz]

Would you pay $100 for a 2-GB memory card in order to save the hassle of plugging in a USB cable?

Yeah, I definitely would.

This Could be Brilliant

[BarefootClown]

So far, everybody seems to be missing one of the greatest possible uses of this card: covert photography.

Think about it: reporters, or anybody else, can take pictures of, say, government abuse. They get caught, and told to delete the pictures (or have the camera confiscated). But the joke is on the jack-booted thug: the data has already been copied to a laptop in a bag carried by that unassuming guy over -->thataway.

Any opportunity to move data without the destination being easily traced is a great opportunity to route around censorship.

Burgers

[Harmonious Botch]

One burger for me, one for the wife.
Huh?? What's a wife? Ohhh, I forgot this is slashdot. A wife is a member of the oposite sex that you have a permanent relationship with.
What's that?? What's a relationship? It's like how you feel about your computer, but towards another human being.

2GB + WIFI for $100 = Great

[maurert]

People are missing the point comparing the $15 GB card with the 2gb + Wifi for $100. This isn't about space. Take Nikon for example. You have to shell out some $2K for a D200 to even have the option to ADD the feature of wifi. With this card a $1000 D80 can have wifi.

Where is WIFI useful? Not on your hiking trip to the back country. In those cases one can easily make the case for high density memory cards and perhaps a digital wallet type device.

Where is is a WIFI camera useful? Around the house and around the studio. A point and shoot WIFI camera can automatically upload the pictures to the house network. A lower cost D80 that meets 100% of portrait studio needs or 98% commercial studio needs uses the 2GB card as a buffer and uploads to the business computer. Imagine you family portrait pictures appearing on a large flat panel display behind the photographer within seconds of the camera shutter being tripped. All without the family having to break poses. Imagine a wedding photographer where the on location printing service displays candids of the chicken dance even before the music stops. Meanwhile the photographer never needs to reload, switch cards, or manage the images other than to occasionally make sure he's got images in the bag, or in the computer. All without having to pay the extra $1000. Both the $1000 D80 and the $2000 D200 depreciate to a couple of hundred dollars within 3 years. So saving the $1000 up front means the photographer has an extra $333/year to do somethings else with.

Also think amusements parks. Just inside the gate of most are a flock of photographers grabbing pictures of couples and small groups. They typically use cheap cameras with an off camera flash. Cheap WIFI would mean the park goers' pictures would be ready for viewing and purchase before they could walk to the kiosk.

Disney could take this to a whole new level. Already Disney's photographers are at a whole different level than your typical summer amusement parks entrance flock. They are full time well trained year round employees. The Disney photographer hands you an ID card with a bar code. They scan the bar code after they shoot you and your pictures appear on your own personal webe site. With WIFI the pictures could be on the web site within seconds. More and more people walk around with web enabled phones so you could be viewing your Disney pictures while you wait in line at It's a Small World.

So compare 2GB+WIFI with a high density card. The goal of the high density card is to carry fewer cards and make fewer switches. 2GB + WIFI can eliminate the need for multiple cards for some and eliminate switches.

Todd

Other Uses?

[mr-Shutter]

Is it possible to use the SD-WIFI in other applications besides uploading photos? I think it would be very useful for other devices. I would like to see this used in other ways then just a camera. $100 for 2 gigs of memory and a WI-FI could be very useful in embedded applications, not just cameras. If you're worried about backing up photos while shooting, I rather not have all my photos uploaded to a site. What would be nice if cameras, or the sad card, use Bluetooth to connect to a laptop near by or even a portable HDD in your pocket. That would make sure you have a hard copy of you images near by, and I prefer that. I wouldn't want to wonder if I do or don't have a backup on some server in France.

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought about this exact idea a while ago. I bounced it off a couple of people I know, and they said "It's called a cameraphone."

Note to self: never trust tech skills of anyone else again.