Eye-Fi Share Video Wi-Fi SD Card

Eye-Fi cards carry a premium over standard-issue SD Cards, but that higher price buys a unique convenience. Like other Eye-Fi cards, the newest versions can transfer photos to the Web–but now they can send video as well.

At 4GB, the $80 Eye-Fi Share Video and the $100 Eye-Fi Explore Video (which inserts geotagging information) have double the capacity of previous Eye-Fi cards; even so, they still feel somewhat paltry compared with standard 16GB SD Cards, which can be had for a fraction of the price.

You’re paying that amount of money for the Eye-Fi Manager, which runs inside a browser and provides easy access to managing the content on the card. The upload smarts remain in the card itself; plug the SDHC media into your PC, and it can connect to a wireless network and then start uploads automatically.

You can send images to any of a growing number of popular photo sharing sites and social networks (including Facebook, Flickr, and Shutterfly); likewise for video files, which you can send to YouTube and similar sites. The total number of supported sites is now at 30.

I found the card easy to use, but the Eye-Fi Manager software wouldn’t display properly on my MSI Wind U100 netbook–the software’s resolution couldn’t adapt to the netbook’s small screen. And although I enjoyed the card’s convenience and the ease of uploading, I didn’t like how uploads start automatically by default: Images not meant for public viewing could end up on the Web. I also disliked how the card took longer to transfer the images to the Web than it did to copy them to my PC. That’s to be expected, of course, but I would have preferred having some more file management and preselection options before the card proceeded to upload my images.

I appreciated the upload options that Eye-Fi Manager did offer, including SMS text alerts for upload progress, as well as the software’s ability to copy to the PC and to the Web simultaneously.