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Toshiba Adds Two-Way Wi-Fi To SD Card
judgecorp writes "Toshiba has announced an SD card with Wi-Fi. This is an advance on previous products such as the Eye-Fi Pro X2, as it allows two-way transfers over Wi-Fi. This will be a very convenient feature. It has been labelled a security worry — but most of us already have cameras with wireless connections ... called phones."
We may all already have phones - but this would be invaluable for someone who takes a professional-quality image or video of say, law enforcement. Any data recorded stands a better chance of being immediately put out of reach from your average plod
"You want me to erase all the evidence I just recorded of you officer? Of course."
How would this work?
SD cards are just block storage. Surely it wouldn't modify the underlying filesystem while being connected to a host? Wouldn't that potentially corrupt the filesystem?
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
It has been labelled a security worry â" but most of us already have cameras with wireless connections ... called phones
Please, even the best cellphone camera is a toy compared to what a pro or semi pro would be using. Most cell phone camera's are pretty much a point and shoot whereas I'd be using a digital slr with a wide range of lenses. I'm not putting down cell phone camera's. I'm just saying that comparing (example) my Iphone 4 camera to a digital SLR is like apples to oranges.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
but most of us already have cameras with wireless connections ... called phones.
Not everybody wants to have a separate $60 per month data or data+voice plan for every separate camera that the family owns.
Wow! 2 way WiFi you mean it sends as well as receives?
No, what it means is that you can have a scheme something like:
What this means is that a photographer can shoot until their battery runs out while a nearby notebook or WiFi enabled SAN device records the images. Instead of being limited to 32 GB, you can happily fill a terabyte drive or more.
Or if you're concerned about the data's safety locally (journalist working in a dangerous area, someone taking pictures of authorities who might take the camera away) you can even set the device that's receiving the images to upload into a remote FTP or some kind of cloud based service.
Or am I missing something?
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Presently a WiFi enabled network camera costs at least $100 and up, but usually more. Usually they start at several hundred dollars. A WiFi enabled megapixel camera costs several hundred dollars, usually starting around $500 and very quickly going far north of there. An HD network or wireless network camera typically starts at $900 and up!
Meanwhile, you can purchase a Canon 12 megapixel point and shoot(excellent little camera) that even does HD video for around $100. I've been wanting to WiFi enable such a beast and have an inexpensive multi-megapixel wireless network camera for a long time. But, using an EyeFi doesn't work well because it's slow, it can't stream video(it only uploads saved files) and it's complex to get the camera scripted to continuously snap pictures.
Can Toshiba's new card be used in the above scenario to turn an excellent but inexpensive camera into a HD wireless network (video?) camera for a reasonable price? I need something like this to break through the present artificial price barrier.
I see that they put "pro" in the name (Eye-Fi Pro X2).... there is nothing "professional" about it. Both Canon and Nikons top range (professional) cameras use only Compact Flash. This card should be called the "Eye-Fi Semi-Pro/Noob X2"
http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
With any luck the reprap (3D printer) community can do something with this... Wireless uploads to a 3D printer, possibilities!
Canon's 1D and 1Ds series have used both compact flash and SD cards. Pentax 645D also uses SD cards only. The 1D series is >$5k and the 1Ds and 645D are closer to $10k. Hard to say those aren't 'pro'.
While that may have been out 10 years ago, it will not fit in typical camera SD card slots because it is too long, and therefore is unusable for cameras where the card slot is enclosed. In addition, this has storage capabilities as well, as opposed to simply being a SD form factor for a wifi adapter.
WHow to the camera elitist. "Only quality non noob cameras use Compact Flash" Shoe? Mouth
I see that they put "pro" in the name (Eye-Fi Pro X2).... there is nothing "professional" about it.Both Canon and Nikons top range (professional) cameras use only Compact Flash.This card should be called the "Eye-Fi Semi-Pro/Noob X2"
i have a 7D which is considered semi-pro/prosumer can all it uses is compact flash. so your logic is invalid here at /.
I think the higher security worry should be that this could be used to silently plug a pre-configured Wifi device on a PC. What if you make it discreet, using some sort of rootkit and use a program to extract data from the device - and the networks it has access to?
People already use this today, see Stuxnet. This would allow for an extra communication device and could come handy. You'd avoid wired networks security measures, and short of scambling wireless frequencies or scanning for odd signals, which not many companies do because they have no reason to, you're defenseless. Scary.
I just reached into my desk drawer and pulled out my SD card with built-in 2 way WiFi that I bought years ago. How is this new?
yea and when compact flash was king in PDA's you could get wifi, ethernet, gps, modems you name it
no one even makes compact flash anymore, besides its just an ide interface not magic
SDIO Wi-fi cards have been around for ages; I remember trying to find one for my Palm Treo 650 to get it online and not being able to afford it.
one
two
eh? so the two 16Gb Sandisk CF cards I bought from Amazon last week are not real? A mirage perhaps?
My D700 & D3 would beg to disagree with you.
What about the Barn Owl pictures I took last Thursday in North Norfolk. They aren't real. A figment of my imagination.
Pah! Fail.
I mean, props to them for trying something a bit different, but SanDisk and several others beat them to it by over a decade...
For instance, I have in my hand here a Sandisk 256MB + WiFi SDIO card which I've had since the early 2000's (It's my Tapwave Zodiac's gateway to the Internet ;))
It's only 802.11b and runs on the very slow SD 1-bit interface tho', whereas Toshi's holds 8GB and hopefully uses the faster SDHC IO interface...?
BACK THEN:
What Sandisk did 10 years ago was a network card running over a SPI bus. (It's just like you classic network card, but over an SDIO slots' bus instead of PCIe or USB)
That means that, using correct drivers, a PalmOS or a WindowsCE PDA could use the card to access WiFi network. (At a time where most built-in options were IrDA and maybe bluetooth for the top-level PDAs).
I did use similar card to get WiFi access on my Plam Tungsten T3 and Tapwave Zodiac.
They are similar to the CF Wifi cards for PDA (which are WiFi adapter, running over an IDE/ATAPI/Compact Flash/16bit PC card Bus). Psion used such WiFi CF modules.
Later models also added memory as an extra functionality. Using only 1 single slot, you got a WiFi adapter *AND* a few megabyte of Flash, both packaged inside a SD-Card.
WHEREAS:
The WiFi SD cards that started appearing since a couple of year like the Eye-Fi series are an entirely different beast. Ten years ago, the most you could embed into such a piece of plastic was a network controller. Today, inside an SD Card package, you could even fit a system-on-a-chip. That means that the SD card it self contains some logic. You pop-up the card into any SD-card enabled device, and the SD-card's onboard electronic is able to connect and upload pictures on its own. Without need of any support from the device (except, well at some point of time you need to set the configuration. But you could do that from a supported device, say a Windows Laptop with a special SDIO-to-USB adapter. And then plug it into a unsupported device). Whereas older cards were "just" Wifi adapter, with the host device (usually a PDA with proper drivers) doing all the work, the modern WiFi SD cards are autonomous.
A Toshiba or EyeFi card is to a Sandisk, exactly the same as what KillerNic and Intel's AMT are to plain old network card. Both are connected to a network, but the modern devices contain enough logic to be able to do things on their own.
Or if you prefer, these modern WiFi cards contain their very own simplified file servers, with which you can fetch files written on the flash portion, even if the photo camera into which is inserted has no fucking idea of a network is in the first place.
Similar concept have been available since a long time on CF cards too (except that the first didn't have wifi connection, but simple cabled connection. They were basically dual-ported flashcards, with photocamera writing on one side, and the PC reading on the other). I've only witnessed a couple of very expensive professional gigs running such setups.
What is new in today's card, is that its supposed to be 2-way. The filesystems format used commonly on flash media (FAT32 or more recently FATX and NTFS) are awefully messy pieces of shit. Among other, they cannot be simultaneously written on by two different systems (note that most hi quality modern filesystems neither, unless they were specifically designed for). So usually, the photo camera mounts the card with full read/write access, and the embed wifi sharing system inside the SD card only reads the data. It cannot attempt to write to the card, because the main device, the photocamera, won't be aware of the modifications done by the embed system, won't take them into account, and will end up corrupting the data on the flash.
Thus EyeFi are read-only: they can only autonomously upload/send photo. Not download/recieve them.
I suspect that Toshiba's two-way sharing won't be universally supported by all cameras. It either requires some support from the camera firmware (so the cards can use locks and request-for-refresh to make the camera aware that the data is being rewritten).
Or some full support from the camera (perhaps, with supported camera, the two-way is handled by the camera it self, and the WiFi SD is put into a "dumb netowkr adapter over SPI" mode) - so in fact these camera work exactly like the WiFi enabled ones, except that it uses an external old-style WiFi card instead of its own.
Or some other weird restriction (the phot
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3rd parties did write drivers for other PDAs too back then. Palm had a driver for most Palm OS devices. So the disclaimer isn't 100% correct.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The newstaper didn't bother with local storage; it was all being uploaded live all the time. As long as you have connectivity, of course.