Eye-Fi Card - How does it work?

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Looking at buying one of these for my 5D MkIII. ATM I have a compact flash card and SD card installed in the camera, so presume that I will replace the SD card with the Eye-Fi card. The photos will be stored on the CF card, question is are they also stored on the Eye-Fi card until transmitted to receiver or deleted. Or does the Eye-fi card only serve as a wireless transmitter to send photos stored on CF card?
 
Very Slowly!

Perhaps a more helpful answer: The Eye-Fi card only transmits the images stored on it - so if you set the camera to record RAW to the CF and JPG to the SD, it will open send the jpg through as and when they are written to the card.

You configure the card in your PC and can select a variety of options - sent the images to your PC, iPad or to their servers, only send JPG files, or RAW files or both, delete the images after they've been sent etc.

The thing to be wary of however is if you stick the SD card in alongside a nice fast DF card, the speed of the CF card will be limited by the write speed of the SD card.
 
Thanks for the comprehensive reply, I think I'll give it a miss as i don't want to limit the speed of my nice fast CF cards.
 
i think you can set them to cycle? where they delete the oldest picture when they are full
my card is tempremental too :\
 
i wouldn't be too bothered about write speeds slowing down, the eye fi cards are only really useful for sending jpegs raw files just take too long
considering the jpeg thats being written to the eye fi card is about half the size of the raw written to the CF card and taking into account the transfer speed those nice fast CF cards become unimportant

another point is what you are going to use the eye fi card for ?
the thing i use mine for is to transfer jpegs straight to the pc as i take photos so i can see what iv'e got rather than looking at the back of the camera
to view the images as they come in i use fastpictureviewer set to monitor a folder for new files which it will then
automatically display it works well

a couple of things about using eye fi cards in dslrs especially one with cast ally bodies the wireless range is pants probably 20ft at best
the transfer rate is ok but it takes about 6 - 8 seconds to transfer a jpeg from the camera to the pc sitting a few feet away the further you are from the wifi router or laptop in ad hoc mode the longer it takes
i'm not sure if there will be an improvement in a 5d mk3 using the eye fi SD card without a CF adapter because of less shielding all thing being equal it should be

there cheap enough to experiment with how useful they really are for me is debatable but i have one and drag it out every now and again to have a play :)
 
cosmicma said:
i wouldn't be too bothered about write speeds slowing down, the eye fi cards are only really useful for sending jpegs raw files just take too long
considering the jpeg thats being written to the eye fi card is about half the size of the raw written to the CF card and taking into account the transfer speed those nice fast CF cards become unimportant
Click to expand...

On that point, I may be wrong, but my understanding was that if you have both an SD card and a CF card installed and the camera is set to write to both simultaneously, the faster card is throttled to the speed of the slower card. Given the 5DIII does not support UHS (Ultra High Speed), as soon as you stick an SD card in and write to both, even if the tiny jpg is the one being written to the SD card, the CF card will also be throttled down to the same 20MB/s when writing the much larger RAW file. Looking at Google this morning, 20MB/s appear to be the max speed for an SD card.

That said - I thought I'd do a bit of a quick test myself as there looks to be a lot of rumour involved. I set the camera to MF, Manual 1/200, 7 shot bracket, High speed drive and measured the time from pressing the shutter to the red 'write' light going out and I came up with the following.

4.5 sec (RAW to 60MB/s CF / JPG to 45MB/s SD)
4.2 sec (RAW to 60MB/s CF Only)
2.5 sec (JPG to 45MB/s SD only)
2.7 sec (JPG to `EyeFi Pro X2')

Now, if what I'd written above is correct, you would expect to see the RAW+JPG at around 3 times that of the RAW only - and it's not. It is a teeny bit longer, but not much. That means that either the 5DIII supports faster than 20MB/s in the SD slot, or the write speeds are not linked. I've no idea to be honest and frankly it probably doesn't matter. So on that basis I'll retract my earlier comments!

The EyeFi is still very slow at transferring over the JPG though!
 
cosmicma said:
a couple of things about using eye fi cards in dslrs especially one with cast ally bodies the wireless range is pants probably 20ft at best
the transfer rate is ok but it takes about 6 - 8 seconds to transfer a jpeg from the camera to the pc sitting a few feet away the further you are from the wifi router or laptop in ad hoc mode the longer it takes
i'm not sure if there will be an improvement in a 5d mk3 using the eye fi SD card without a CF adapter because of less shielding all thing being equal it should be
Click to expand...

My experience is different, I use them in a 5D3 for event work, I can get much longer range than that, I shot an event in December and was getting 50 metres no problem, at that I was constrained by the room, not by the eyefi card.

I shoot reduced size jpeg to the eyefi and it fires across a network I set up (using a tiny TP Link nano router) to a Macbook and dyesub printer, speed is sufficient that there is never a backlog, note I am not machine gunning, not shooting high speed sports or anything.
 
the range does seem to vary depending on which camera they are used in (oddly), my D7000 + D800 had a much better range than the D5100 that I'm using it with now. Shuttersnitch is well worth buying too, much better than the standard software for displaying images on an IOS device.
 
i think the distance the cards will transmit depends on the amount of shielding around it when inserted into the camera i know on my 1dx the distance is not very good but you have to take the CF adapter in to consideration which has a metal jacket on both sides which is inserted into a camera with a cast alloy body which will shield the card even more
some people strip the metal jacket off the CF adapter to improve wi fi distance
using the card in a native slot should give better performance and looking at marks post it certainly does

as far as speed is concerned the wait for the card to transmit an image far out weighs the loss in write performance to the card i consider it a non issue these eye fi cards are not that useful if you want to see high speed bursts instantly but it's not going to prevent you from taking a high speed burst the 1dx does over 30 raw images before the buffer is full using raw n high quality jpeg reduces the burst to the buffer to about 16 frames i suppose the question is how many frames do you want to capture in one burst ?

the wait for the buffer to write the to cards and then transmit to the pc would be quite considerable but at least it will do it

the thing about the eye fi cards is there a fantastic little tool for not a lot of money the alternatives are fortunes

i had a similar card years ago for a mobile phone i still have it somewhere i suppose it's what attracted me to the eye fi card a little bit of nostalgia i suppose :)
sandisk-wi-fi-sd-combination-card_1.jpg
 
I have one but I wouldn't put it in my main camera tbh.
I put it in my lumix, worked a treat but took some configuring and backed up to my tablet.
so for that purpose, really good. but if you're shooting RAW that's a lot of wifi data and also it drains your battery life naturally.
If I really wanted to use it for pro work , I would have a CF card, write small JPEGs to the eyefi and then have that transmit for immediate edits/posts.
I'm not so keen anymore. also I had a sandisk one. the build quality was poor, it's going back!

surely range depends upon the weather proofing, build quality etc of the camera.
one advantage is that you won't be using a SD->CF adapter
 
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