i remember reading that there was eye-fi support enabled in the camera...anyone used it.
and no...im not wondering about wirelessly shooting the raw files through the eye-fi at some blinding speed
heres what i am HOPING for with the D800...
saving RAW files to 32gb CF card and jpegs (hopefully small versions) to my eyefi, which then gets sent to my iMac in a folder that lightroom is watching for a nice big instant preview OR sent directly to my iPad when im away from my computer. later the RAW files are brought in and jpegs deleted.
a version of this works EXTREMELY well for me and my clients with a 1Ds2, except i just save RAW and a small jpeg on the eye-fi card, but only have the card upload the jpegs. i can get away with this with those "smaller" files, but ill need the larger 2 card set up for the D800.
anyone done anything like this or can at least tell me their experience?
almost all of my work is with people and a ton of that is with seniors or other people who have never really been in front of a camera. other times ill work with pageant people, makeup people, or boutique owners. in ALL of those cases, nearly instant viewing of a HUGE picture GREATLY benefits EVERYONE involved. i cant stress that enough
...and no wires for anyone to trip on offsets any tiny bit of speed loss or anything like that
a while back, they did some magic with the eye-fi that allowed it to actually create a wifi network IF it wasnt in range of one you had previously set up...i believe they call it "direct mode" and i got it through a firmware update.
i have mine set to start up when im out of range of my created ad hoc connection.
i also use the shuttersnitch app to grab the pics, but i have to tell my iPad 2 to join its connection...shuttersnitch does the rest.
im not going to lie to you...its not the smoothest solution. the eye-fi/ipad/shuttersnitch rarely stay talking to each other and i have to stay on top of it.
i tend to shoot in bursts, fiddle with the tech, get them to pretend to be friendly, let them load, review pics with client...lather, rinse, repeat.
there is something that seems to happen when i start shooting again for any amount of time that causes the connection to be lost.
my studio setup with the imac and ad hoc connection (created from imac) is pretty stable and not very buggy. only when i get out of range and come back into range is there SOMETIMES a hiccup, but thats usually remedied by simply shooting another frame or at worst, turning off the camera, then on and shooting a frame and giving it a second.
again, the ipad/eyefi direct mode w/shuttersnitch isnt nearly as smooth, but that ipad screen sure looks better than the tiny one on the back of my 1Ds2.
2 little notes of interest. i set my camera to auto off after 4 or 8 minutes...that helps a whole lot with not dropping the connecting, in the studio at least.
the other thing is that, to my eyes, the ipad 1 and 2 cant render the fine detail to check critical focus...unless im missing something, but ive loaded edited pics and its hard for me to tell their focus. the NEW ipad, may remedy this, though...
because of the lack of smoothness in some of the steps, is one of the reasons i asked if anyone used this setup. i didnt know if having a camera that actually knew what an eye-fi card was, made a difference
I do have the new ipad, and am currently using my D800 tethered directly to the ipad. It's not a great solution either, but it works well enough that I was able to show an architectural client the shots as she directed the scene. She loved it, and I think I hid the fact that the technology wasn't perfect well enough.
I might grab an eye fi card and see how it works out.
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Card 1 gets RAW
Card 2 gets JPEG (Basic in my case) Eye-Fi card in Slot 2
JPEGs show up wirelessly on my iPad using either the EyeFi app or ShutterSnitch (both have their advantages/disadvantages, neither is perfect).
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I use the above method on my D7000. Works great!
ShutterSnitch has a killer app called "Shutter Snitch Backup" that transfers jpg files on my EyeFi card automatically to my iMac.
Even "jpeg small" on the d800 is 9 M, 3680x2456. I really wish they would have a couple of "really small" sizes - one to fit the phones and one to fit the pads. It would make the transfers much faster.
I've only use the Eye-fi option. Boy - it is great in theory! But in reality with the d800 my experience mirrors those above - transfers can just decide to stop happening and require some fiddling, and sometimes they can seem to take forever. I've got the "Eye-Fi Pro X2 8gb + wi-fi" card paired with an iPhone 4.
There are known issues with EyeFi direct mode and iOS reliability. I just put both on my local net and it works pretty well. I am concerned, however, as you point out, that the size of even the small D800 JPEGs will prove prohibitive. With the D7000 on small the transfer speeds are on the edge of usefulness as it is.
maybe in the not to distant future we will get either a firmware update for really, really small D800 jpegs and or the new 802.11ac standard (i think thats what its called) will take off
This probably isn't as useful as having the jpegs from the EyeFi, but I've found hooking up a display to the HDMI output surprisingly useful for reviewing images on site. The main advantage being that you don't have to transfer anything and you can pretty much instantly hook up and check a shot.
has anyone had any better results yet using the eye fi cards and d800? is it more reliable in a home set up situation ie. wireless router setup and laptop etc...
You may already be aware of this, but Eye-Fi has admitted that there are definite problems with their card in a D800. You might go to http://forums.eye.fi/viewtopic.php?t=6364. It mostly has to do with "direct mode" where the card sets up an ad hoc network. No know cure yet. I might hold off until I heard from the company that they found a way around it.
BTW, the last post on the thread was back in mid-May. You may not get a response from the original posters, however, it would be interesting to see if any of them ended using the Eye-Fi with a D800 and what those results were.
I got my D800 in from Amazon on monday. My first Nikon lenses on tuesday from B&H and other various goodies throughout the week, but I'm also trying really hard to get caught up on some photoshop, before I head out of town with out youth to church camp, so I've barely played with anything.
Tomorrow will be the first time I try the new method of RAW to CF and small/basic to Eye-Fi card. Just before I typed this, it seemed to be ok, but I will know a whole lot better tomorrow how it goes.
I'm bummed to hear about the direct mode issues, but maybe they will find a solution or something like that.
Just out of curiosity (because I'm wondering this as I type it) but do you think it is possible to somehow use the hdmi slot and iPad together? powderific's post got me thinking about that, since as someone else mentioned...all I REALLY want, out in the field, is for more people to be able to see the images on something bigger than the camera screen. That's it. No editing or even rating...just a big display so my clients can better see what is working and what is not.
Just to follow up on my shoot the other day, it was my first real use of my D800. Up to that point I had only done shots of the ceiling fan, a few of my family's dogs and some pics of the new lensalign I got as part of my kit.
I shot uncompressed 14-bit RAW to my 32gb Sandisk CF card and small, basic jpeg to my Eye-Fi X2 Pro card which was directly connected to my 27" iMac through an ad hoc connection.
I've got to say, it worked really great
Even though the small files were much bigger than the files I use to upload with my Canon 1Ds2 (M2 size jpeg), the D800/Eye-Fi seemed noticeably faster and even better than that, IT SEEMED LIKE IT WAS IN CONSTANT CONTACT WITH THE IMAC. In other words, it was like it was uploading the whole time, as opposed to, my Canon which only uploads when I stop shooting. I guess because the D800 is "aware" of the Eye-Fi, it felt like shooting and loading were almost simultaneous instead of the shoot a few, wait, load, shoot a few, wait, load process that happen with my older Canon. This allowed my clients to see the results even more quickly and make corrects sooner if we needed to tweak something with the models or clothing/accessories.
As a side note, I haven't quite put my finger on how the D800 works with its metering and auto-off (or lack thereof) but the manual suggested turning up the meter timing after the shot (something like that) so I moved it to 5 minutes for the studio and only had 1(minor) hiccup in connection vs several (minor ones) for my Canon.
Also, I haven't tried the direct mode to iPad, but the AWESOMENESS of how well yesterday went in the studio makes the problem with the iPad, that much more of a disappointing, head-scratcher.
Since I have no reason to doubt other peoples experience, I would love to have some sort of wired tether to the iPad, since I would be "wearing" both. Of course, I would love an Eye-Fi solution even more
