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Maximize Your Eye-Fi Range for Event Shooting

November 7, 2007 by Photojojo in Camera Accessories, For Pros

41PXN0HFYWL._SS500_.jpg

Itching to use your new Eye-Fi Wireless SD card to shoot an event, but want to make sure photos can get downloaded no matter where you are as you’re wandering around?

We’ve got the solution.

First, make sure you’ve read these instructions for setting up Eye-Fi to work without Internet.

To maximize the range in this setup, you’ll want to pick up the D-Link DWL-G730AP Wireless Pocket Router. For about $50, you get a full-featured portable wireless router that can be powered over USB.

Add this pocket-size rechargeable battery pack with included USB cable, and you’ve got a battery-powered wifi router that you can easily carry on your person as you shoot. (The battery will power the router for about 4 hours.)

Now, just set up your new portable router just as described in these instructions and head to the shoot. Only, instead of putting your router in a central location, keep your little D-Link on you as you shoot. Because the Eye-Fi’s antennas is smaller than your laptop’s, this will ensure that it’ll stay in range of your router (just a few feet away) and so will your laptop.

Photo downloading bliss!

(Thanks to Ziv Gillat, Eye-Fi Founder, for the tip!)

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  • Bob Fry
    Or....just buy a couple of extra 2GB memory cards. Way cheaper and easier.

    Eye-fi seems great, but it's impractical where I'd like to use it most: traveling. There you want to be able to connect to lots of different wi-fi hotspots and upload your pix on the fly. But because Eye-fi requires each hotspot be accepted, you can't do it with only your camera. Too bad.
  • Hey Bob,

    It's true that hotspots need to be approved before they're used, though you can then use as many as you want.

    Eye-Fi isn't meant to be a big meaty memory card for vacations - there's plenty of those.

    It's made to make your photo downloading and sharing much easier on the 365 days (minus two weeks) of the year when you're NOT on vacation.

    For storing a gigs upon gigs of vacation photos until you get back home, definitely stock up on the some cards!
  • K.Weng
    so what's the responsiveness like ? If you're basically trying to use this setup (as you would the canon/nikon $1k version), to achieve "tethered" behavior, so that you can see your picture on the computer screen shortly after you take the picture, what's the actual transmission time ?

    The key with other systems seems to be sending the embedded jpg before sending the raw since it's much smaller and will be much quicker, or not sending the raw at all if you're taking pictures rapidly. I assume this system has no way to achieve that.

    But it's all moot anyway if even for the jpg it still takes 10+ seconds, it's just too long to wait while you have a person sitting there in a portrait session or something ....
  • Depends on the camera, the network, etc. but it's not optimized the way those $1,000 canon/nikon ones are. (ie. it doesn't send resized preview before the real thing, it just sends the real thing.) Takes about 10 seconds per image on my setup.

    Amit
  • Hendrik
    I would be interested in using this for arial kite photography. I was thinking of getting a camera such as the Canon SD430 with built in wireless technology however this may change my mind... my main question is transmission length. If I have a high gain directional antenna attached to the computer how far do you think I could get a singal.. ideally I'd like about 500-1000ft line of sight outside.
  • Mitch
    Can this be used as a repeater?
    ~~~~ = wifi
    ---- = cable
    I want to go eye.fi~~~~>Wifi router/repeater in pocket~~~~>wifi router connected to net.
    I So router in pocket connects to wifi nearby acting as a repeater.

    The manual for Client Mode states
    Laptop ---> DWL-730P~~~~> wifi router

    If i get 5mbps or 10mbps in areas on my laptop do you think the eye.fi will be powerful enough?
  • Hi there - if you delete an image from the camera - will it delete the file on the computer? cheers
  • A new 3G router from CradlePoint will be shipping on December 20th that has a rechargeable battery. With this router, an EyeFi card can send files over the Verizon EVDO network, without the need of a computer or even a power outlet.

    Read our new article about the PHS300 and EyeFi card here:

    http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/2206/63/

    For more information about the forthcoming PHS300, check out our full review:

    http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/2201/63/

    The CradlePoint PHS300 will initially be available only through the EVDO Experts at http://3GStore.com
  • Ray
    I want to use this in my PPC (Dell Axim) as memory and LAN connectivity - will it work for that?
  • John
    Sorry Ryan, if you delete a photo off your computer or a photo-sharing site online, it won't delete the photo from the Eye-Fi card. To do so, you must either connect the card thru a SD reader and delete the photos, or delete the photos using in-camera functions. Great card though, just not sure if I'll use it traveling to Europe this Summer, as it may use more battery power to juice up the built-in antenna vs. a card without an active antenna. Haven't figured out how to "stop" the antenna from operating and use it as a regular SD card yet. For now, I'll just use my power-save functions on the camera to minimize card-access time and save battery power.
  • Hi,

    In terms of view-as-you-shoot, I've had a lot of success doing this with the eye-fi in a Nikon D3 with a CF adapter and some (free) software I wrote for the purpose. Less bulky than a "proper" 'mitter, and sending small jpegs while also writing RAWs works brilliantly.

    The software can be downloaded from http://www.ikontools.com/

    Jon
  • Jason
    I'm thinking of using EyeFi for mission related work where I take a picture and send the image through Eyefi to a laptop then gets printed automatically to a printer without out any user intervention. Is there any tool that let me do this?

    Jason
  • Oh I wish I was a yankie! The new CradlePoint portable 3G router /Eye Fi comb is seriously going to kick ass in the USA. Alas, I happen to live and work in the UK, so no joy here for the foreseeable future. Having been a freelance press photographer for most of my professional life, this technology is nothing short of breathtaking. With the right setup (ie: a couple of repeaters between the studio and the laptop), I can really see this working in a event/ studio working environment. Lucky for me that ebay came to the rescue and now a D-Link portable router is winging it's way to me as I type. I'd love to see if the Cradlepoint/Eye Fi setup could work with a PDA, so that you could edit and caption your pictures before sending them on, that would really rock my work. John
  • Steve
    I have the pictures automatically uploaded to my Macbook Pro to a pictures folder that is shown by screen save automatically.

    You can use folder actions to print any picture uploaded to a folder.
  • OP
    How about connecting to iPhone Wi-fi and using the 3G on iphone to upload photo???
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