Appletell reviews EyeFi Pro X2 wireless SD card

Provides: wireless SD memory card
Developer: Eye-Fi
Minimum Requirements:SDHC compatible camera, Mac OSX 10.5, or 10.6, 100MB of free space, Internet connection, 802.11 b/g/n
Price: $149.99
Availability: Now

Eye-Fi has been the clear choice for wireless memory cards since they launched their initial wireless memory card. This is not only because they’re they only ones doing it, but because they’re pretty darn good at it, too. But there’s been a hole in their lineup for some time now: a truly Pro memory card. The original Pro card just wasn’t fast enough to keep up with a shutter-happy photographer. So Eye-Fi has attempted to answer that issue this year with the Eye-Fi Pro X2 card with 8GB of storage, Class 6 read/write speeds, and RAW support. As if that wasn’t enough, this was the first card to get Endless Memory Mode and wireless N support. So, can they call it Pro now?

Class 6 read/write

I’m not a Pro photographer, but I’d have to say that the Pro X2 is indeed good enough to call itself Pro. Class 6 read/write speeds aren’t the fastest available, and SDHC isn’t the most up to date memory format either (SHXC is), but these features are still very good. Class 6 is likely much faster than the memory cards that most consumers would find in their cameras right now, and likely what a lot of pro photographers use, as well. Class 6 provides for 6 MB/s of transfer speed or better (basically, the class number guarantees a minimum transfer speed of that many MB/s). For my camera, that’s about 1 RAW image per two seconds or one JPEG per second.

That doesn’t mean that your camera can’t take more than 1 RAW image per 2 seconds; it has built in memory for holding images to be written to your card. But, more often than not, your memory card is a bottleneck in terms of speed. Eye-Fi could have really hit the ball out of the park by making this card Class 10, but I suspect it would have just been too costly. I wouldn’t be surprised to be talking about the Pro X3 next year with SDXC support. Until then, if you’re really concerned, no one says you can’t have two memory cards, one Eye-Fi and another one that has Class 10 or higher. Honestly, it’s a good practice to carry more than one card around as insurance anyway.

Location data

I’ve spent far too much time talking about the read/write speed of this memory card, because that’s simply not the point. Class 6 brings this card up to an acceptable level for a Pro photographer, and the extra features of this card are going to outweigh the speed for most, anyway. Take, for instance, the fact that this card can add location data for most of your images. And it works great, when it actually works. It relies on WiFi, like many of the features of this card. So, provided there are accessible wireless hotspots when and where you take a picture, you can expect those images to be tagged with location data. That said, I recently spent a week in Disney World on my honeymoon and none of my non-iPhone pictures have location data. But that’s a little unfair considering it’s impossible to find a free and open WiFi hotspot at Disney. Back home, I’ve taken many images downtown and had them tagged with pretty precise locations, which never ceases to amaze me. It’s like magic honestly. And I’m actually pretty happy with the performance of this function of the card since Disney is an unfair test. Outside of Disney, I had better support for this feature. This WiFi based feature will never work 100% of the time, but hopefully more often than you might think. Pretty good for not having a GPS chip inside of it.

Endless memory

Let’s move on to other new features. How about Endless Memory Mode? This turns your 8GB card basically into the size of your hard drive at home. How? Basically, through controlled deletion. Let me explain. First, you have to find a wireless hotspot that the Eye-Fi card can use. This could be you home network or one of the thousands of Eye-Fi compatible hotspots at places like McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc. It’s not always apparent when your card is actively uploading pictures since it doesn’t make a sound or anything, but you can set up notification in the form of email or text messages to alert you to key events, like when an upload begins or ends.

Now, while your camera is on (the card needs power to do its magic), it will upload pictures to the net and then distribute them as you’ve set it up to do. Right now we’re concerned about straight to your computer, as we’ve covered the other destinations in our review of Eye-Fi Explore. Suffice to say you can get your pictures straight out of your camera to just about anywhere including Flickr, Facebook etc. But being that this is a Pro card, you’ll likely want to have them go to your computer before you go publishing them online.

Okay, so after an image has made is successfully from your Pro X2 (or other Endless Memory Mode Eye-Fi card really) to your computer, it can then be deleted from the card. This feature requires some extra things inside of the card in terms of hardware, so only X2 or later cards can support this. Not sure how often you take over 8GB of pictures, but if it does happen and you have access to WiFi, then you can extend the memory of this card to whatever it is that you need it to be. This is a pretty powerful feature, and it’s even more useful when you have access to an 802.11N network since the pictures can be uploaded much faster than on other networks. It won’t be as fast as you can take them, but again, I don’t know anyone who takes 8 gigs of pictures in less than a few minutes. The feature can be set to start deleting pictures after a prescribed percentage of memory usage. Let’s say you set it to 25%. After 1GB of memory has been used on your Pro X2, it will attempt to upload and then delete images from itself until it makes it below 1GB again. And I’d recommend setting it low if you plan on using this feature since it’s safer to have images at home, and you won’t always have access to WiFi, so it’s best to have as much free memory as possible. Remember, you’ll need to have Eye-Fi Center open and running at home on your internet connected computer for all of this magic to happen.

Eye-Fi Center

Along with the Eye-Fi Pro X2 card comes some new software. It’s called Eye-Fi Center, and it’s available for all Eye-Fi users. This software is much better than the previous web-based tool, though it still feels a bit odd given its wonky interface design. It definitely doesn’t feel like a native Mac app. It’s somewhere in between a web interface and a desktop app in terms of feel.

Anyway, the application makes it easy to change settings on your Eye-Fi card and makes the backend magic happen. When you first open it, it asks if you’d like it to run whenever you start up your computer. I’d suggest saying yes to this, as your pictures can’t download without this app up and running, and you can’t use Endless Memory mode either. If you forget, you can always add it manually through System Preferences on a Mac. Most setting changes in Eye-Fi Center will require you to have the Eye-Fi card attached to your computer. There isn’t much else to talk about concerning this application because it does its thing in the background, so it would be ideal if you never have to interact with it after setup. The only thing you might see from time to time is the little drop down window displaying the currently downloading image. Otherwise, it just sits on your computer and waits to do its thing, which is really the way it should be.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m impressed by the Eye-Fi Pro X2 card. It gives you all of the features we’ve come to love in Eye-Fi cards, namely wireless uploading of pictures and addition of location data. Plus, it adds new and powerful features like wireless N network support, RAW support, and Endless Memory Mode.

While it may not be the fastest memory card available, it certainly is the most feature rich. I think the Pro X2 card is a very useful and powerful tool for many photographers. Location data is becoming more and more important for images we take for ourselves. This card does that for some images taken, and it does so without other expensive accessories (if they’re even available for your camera). It also makes it possible for you to have the capacity of many memory cards without the need to buy or carry extra cards or lug around your computer.

The only potential downside is its price, but when you consider all of the convenience it brings and all of the other accessories it helps prevent you from buying, it’s much easier to justify the expense. It’s hard not to like the Eye-Fi Pro X2.

Appletell Rating:

Buy Eye-Fi Pro X2