sd wifi cards - whats your openion?

I was pricing sd cards in bestbuy and noticed the wifi card. Apperantly you can use it and have the pictures transmitted wirelessly to a wifi device such as a laptop. this would be particularly handy for doing a church directory or in studio pictures.

I was wondering if anyone here has used them, and what you think of them. I can get a wireless transmitter for my canon camera but those things are expensive.

They do work and I know someone who uses one when shooting high-school proms - it does speed up his workflow.

He uses the Eye-fi card but be warned the set-up of the card is terrible. Everything is web based and if you need to make any setting changes you need to be online to do it.

They also need a pretty strong wireless network to link into otherwise take the range indications witha pinch of salt. We could not get above 20-30 ft when line of sight was blocked.

Function - 10/10 if you set it up right and have the right network it works as advertised
Setup / configuration - 5/10 as it was a real PITA.

The eye-fi is great if you don't use their method of sending it to their web server. You can read a lot about how they want to you use it vs. the best way to use it.

Also I'm not sure about the newest eye-fi cards, but some of the older ones could only send .jpgs and nothing else without using software hacks with the card. Basically if you shoot raw it isn't going to work right out of the box. Again this may have changed with the newest cards, but I wouldn't rely on that.

Basically look up "eye-fi card hacking" or something similar to learn how to get the most out of the cards. None involve physical stuff. Typically just custom software. In my experience the cards are severely limited right from the box with supplied software.

ruuustin is correct that the basic Eye-Fi cards do not support RAW but for a few extra $'s you can get pro flavours of the EyeFi cars - http://www.eye.fi/prod​ucts/prox2 that do support RAW and other value-added features.

Check out the above link.

Eye-Fi is good stuff, if you grok wireless networking. if you dont, you may not like it so much.

The card itself has really short wifi access distance, 20-40ft from your access point/ ad hoc station.

a creative person could setup enough of a private wifi network to support roaming an event area and having the shots sent back in near-real time to your processing station, and not worrying about import time and swapping cards around so much.

I personally find it handy when working with someone who can sort while I shoot, as it cuts our 'time to preview' to practically nothing.

Have to agree with the setup process. In their effort to make sure they get paid, they have made the technology really really flaky to change and update.