MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Three years ago, a new kind of memory card went on sale promising to reduce the hassle of transferring photos and video from a camera to your PC or the Web.
The Eye-Fi card has built-in Wi-Fi networking to instantly upload your work. It's still a niche product, although Eye-Fi is getting closer to its dream of enabling wireless uploads as easily as they're performed on smartphones.
Since late 2007, customers have uploaded just over 100 million photos. For now, you can only post images online at photo-sharing sites. You can't e-mail them directly to a friend or yourself. And the card works only in open Wi-Fi hotspots.
But Eye-Fi has formed partnerships with the largest camera manufacturers — including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Sanyo— to offer on-screen menus for uploads in what Eye-Fi calls "connected cameras." And there are apps available for the iPhone and iPad.
Pricing starts at $49.95 for a 4-gigabyte card, substantially more than a plain vanilla 4-GB card (which can be found for as low as $15). The high end: $149 for a superfast 8-GB Eye-Fi card with geo-tagging and other extras. |
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