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May 29, 2009

Eye-Fi Explore Video


Chances are, these days, you won't be buying a new digital camera that doesn't record video. All the major camera manufacturers have been selling point-and-shoot models that do video for a while now, and even D-SLRs are becoming video-capable. While we loved last year's Eye-Fi Explore, its still-image-only support seems limiting at this point. Enter the 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video ($99.99 direct), which provides the same seamless, wireless uploading as its older SD card cousins, but adds video support to the mix.

As with the original Eye-Fi Share and the Explore, the Explore Video looks like your standard-fare SD card and comes with its own USB card reader for setting up and configuring the Eye-Fi Manager software, which is PC and Mac compatible. Setup is simple: It took me no time to configure my test card with my home WEP-encrypted Wi-Fi network and establish my PowerBook as the card's "home base." so any photos or video I shot would be saved automatically to the PowerBook's hard drive when it was powered on. I also linked the card to my Picasa Web Albums and YouTube accounts with no problems.

The Web-based Eye-Fi Manager is also where you control the Explore's geotagging and hotspot capabilities. With geotagging enabled, the card marks the location a photo or video was taken when it's uploaded. You can access geotagging information from within the Manager and in select photo-sharing sites; photos I uploaded to Picasa Web Albums were accompanied by a Google Map, and the locations were accurate within a city block. The Explore is able to upload files from any hotspot in Wayport's network of 10,000-plus, which includes hotels, stores, airports, and many McDonald's and Starbucks restaurants. Within the PCMag office's ZIP code in Manhattan, I found 17 hotspots; a staffer in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, has two local spots, and another in Ithaca, New York, has seven. And to ensure your privacy, any files you upload at a Wayport location are encrypted. You can also set up alerts in the Eye-Fi Manager to inform you via text message or e-mail when uploads start, end, or are interrupted.

The "Video" iterations of both the Eye-Fi Explore and the $79.99 Eye-Fi Share, which lacks the geotagging capabilities and requires you to subscribe for hotspot uploads, can communicate with YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa Web Albums for video uploads. (There are a total of 25 supported sites for photo and video sharing.) The Explore will upload to only one video and one photo site at a time, however, and you can change the destination site only from within the software, not on the camera. You can opt for your uploads to be private at the onset, and choose to share them from the destination site later on.

A 1-minute test video I shot with a Canon PowerShot SD780 IS uploaded to my home computer and my YouTube account in about 10 minutes. A 60-second high-def (1080p) video I shot at a boxing match at Madison Square Garden with a Canon PowerShot SX1 took about 25 minutes to upload.

These somewhat lengthy transfer times lead me to my biggest gripe with Eye-Fi cards in general: They can really sap your camera's battery life. Since the card can communicate with your home network or a hotspot only if the camera is on, with both Canons I had to change the power-save settings so the camera wouldn't automatically shut down during uploads. If you don't know how to adjust those settings on your camera, the Eye-Fi Manager can walk you through the process for most popular brands.

Some digital cameras help to combat the power drain problem by integrating Eye-Fi settings. The Casio Exilim EX-FC-100 (and most of Casio's 2009 lineup) along with the Nikon D60 and D90 let you switch off the Eye-Fi's wireless radio to save battery life. It would be nice if you could do a bit more to control the card, like select which files you want to upload, or tell the camera to shut down automatically when an upload is complete.

Still, there's a lot to like here, and it's hard to imagine going back to cables and manual photo transfers after using the Eye-Fi Explore Video during my evaluation period. A $100 memory card, might feel like a luxury—especially when you can easily find a standard 4GB card for about $30. But if you want to eliminate the wires (and the thought) from transferring photos and videos to your hard drive or sharing sites, the Explore Video does the trick—and it's the most complete Eye-Fi offering to date. It doubles the storage capacity of previous cards and includes lifetime hotspot access, which costs an extra $14.99 a year with the less-expensive Eye-Fi Share Video.
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