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Eye-Fi today announced the Eye-Fi Pro, a 4GB SDHC card that supports wireless transfer of RAW images, ad-hoc network support without the need for a wireless router, and selective transfer of images. I've been waiting for Eye-Fi to support RAW for a very long time, and I was lucky enough to be one of the beta testers for this new release.

I've done nearly all my shooting for the past two months with the Eye-Fi beta card, transferring over a thousand RAW PEF-format and DNG-format images from my Pentax K10D to my Windows XP desktop computer (Vista and Mac also supported) via my home wireless 802.11g network. I also transferred some files direct to a laptop computer using the ad-hoc networking support. The only times I did not use the Eye-Fi were on two outings where I expected to take many more photos than would fit on the card - more on why below.

Shooting Raw
So what do I like about this new Eye-Fi card? First and foremost, having RAW support is awesome. It works especially well when I'm taking shots within range of my Wi-Fi router. I frequently setup a shot on a tripod somewhere in the house. Before the Eye-Fi, I had to remove the card, which disturbed the tripod, and take it to the computer to view the image at full resolution. Now, the image starts transferring to the computer within a few seconds after I've made the shot. Typical compressed PEF RAW files from the 10 megapixel K10D range from about 9 MB to 15 MB in size. Generally it takes about 20 seconds per image to transfer from camera to computer, which is about the amount of time it takes me to walk from the tripod on the main floor to the computer upstairs. If I have the camera setup in the same room as the computer, I have a brief wait, but it's faster and more convenient than removing the card to perform the transfer manually.

Even better is when I'm wandering around outside taking pictures near my house. The RAW images transfer in the background while I'm shooting. By the time I get inside, all the photos are already on the computer ready for importing into Lightroom. It's possible to setup Lightroom to automatically import files from a specified directory to eliminate the manual import step. But when I checked into this, I didn't like the options provided by Lightroom so I chose to perform the manual import.

Most of my usage consisted of taking pictures away from home and transferring them to the computer when I got home. Since I'm in the middle of a picture-a-day project, I had something for Eye-Fi to do every day. Usually I arrived home with about 15 or 20 new shots, but on some days it was over a hundred. On those days with a lot of shots, it took seemingly forever to transfer the files over my 54 Mbps 802.11g network. Averaging about 3 images per minute, a hundred files takes over half an hour. During that time, if I didn't babysit the transfer, my camera would automatically power off since the camera doesn't realize the Eye-Fi is busy. I could set the camera to wait up to 30 minutes before powering off, but sometimes that wasn't long enough. Fortunately, Eye-Fi resumes where it left off, so all I had to do was wake up the camera and the transfer would continue. Due to the long transfer times, on days where I planned in advance to take hundreds or even a thousand pictures at one time, I used my SanDisk Ultra II cards and transferred my images the old-fashioned but faster way.

How Fast is that Card?
Speaking of SanDisk Ultra II, the SanDisk is faster at transferring data from the camera to the card than the beta Eye-Fi card I used. If I want to chimp an image, I have to wait until it has finished transferring to the card. When using the SanDisk card, I can press the preview button shortly after taking a picture and the image always appears right away, but while using the Eye-Fi card, I frequently get an hourglass display and must wait a second or two longer while the image finishes transferring. I never knew the hourglass display existed until I used the Eye-Fi card, so this implies the Eye-Fi is slower than the SanDisk Ultra II. I did not perform specific measurements, nor have I seen specs for the Eye-Fi. The card I used was beta hardware, so the final product may perform better. In any event this is just a minor inconvenience.

Battery Life
The power management setting in the camera had other drawbacks. Normally I like my camera to power down after one minute of inactivity to conserve battery power. To accommodate wireless transfers I initially set it to 15 minutes. However I left it set that way while shooting, so the camera wouldn't power down as frequently. This combined with the power consumed by the Eye-Fi during transfers resulted in noticeably lower battery life. I didn't specifically measure it, but I'd say I got only about half as many shots per charge with Eye-Fi initially than before Eye-Fi. Eventually I got into the habit of changing the power management setting for shooting vs. transferring and battery life returned to near normal, but that's a significant inconvenience given that the K10D power management setting is deep in the menus.

Several camera models, including some of Nikon's latest DSLRs, are tightly integrated with the Eye-Fi and will not power-down during a transfer. Alas, my Pentax K10D is not one of those, and I don't think the new Pentax K-7 will be either.

Ad-Hoc Networking
I also had the opportunity to try ad-hoc peer-to-peer network connectivity. This allows the Eye-Fi card to connect directly to your computer without an intervening wireless router. One use for this would be to transfer images to your laptop away from home. I initially had trouble getting the Eye-Fi card to connect to my laptop via peer-to-peer networking, but eventually got it working with help from the Eye-Fi product manager. As a result of my trials, Eye-Fi improved the documentation and made some software changes to make it easier to setup an ad-hoc connection. My advice: if you're running Windows XP, make sure you enable Internet Connection Sharing while using the ad hoc network, and disable it while connecting your laptop to a wireless router.

I didn't make much real-world use of the ad-hoc connection. It didn't fit into my workflow but I'm sure some people will find a use for it. For example, an event photographer may be taking pictures while another person is printing them from a nearby laptop.

Selective Transfer
The final feature tested during this beta phase was the ability to select which files to transfer. When this feature is enabled, you can choose which files to transfer by protecting or locking those files on your camera. This feature worked well, and is especially useful with large RAW files.

Hot Spots and More
Eye-Fi cards support other features such as transferring files through a Wi-Fi hot spot, uploading pictures directly to image sharing sites such as Flickr, geotagging based on proximity to Wi-Fi hot spots, and more. I did not test any of these features during the beta, but they all look very useful.

Verdict
Overall, it was a delight being able to beta test this product. It was very convenient to be able to view images on the computer without having to connect a cable or remove a card, especially when the camera is mounted on a tripod. Being beta, there were a few crashes in the Eye-Fi Manager software, but they were fixed by later software updates. At no time did I encounter a missing or corrupt image during the testing, even on those few occasions the Manager software crashed. I'm looking forward to continue using the Eye-Fi, especially for studio work.