Category: Equipment

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Eye Fi Pro – Update

A couple of quick updates on the Eye-fi Card.

Eye-fi has released new firmware that allow use without a router. The Eye-Fi card itself now can act as an access point allowing you to download your photo’s directly to your laptop or iPad without having an active wi-fi connection/router available/configured.

It works pretty well however you do not have the ability to change the SSID you are connecting to or the WPA2 Password for the card. It can be a bit tricky setting it up for the first time.

Secondly I have recived a CF adapter and have tested it with the eye-fi card. The good news It works, The bad news, range is drastically reduced.

Using the Eye-fi card in my Nikon P7000 point and shoot. I can send from anywhere in the house and the images show up very rapidly on my laptop. With the Card in the adapter and in my D300 I can send the images to the laptop from about 30ft away ( thru 3 walls) but any further and the images don’t transfer until I get back into range. As well it seems to take quite a bit longer to send the images when only 2 walls were in the way.

This is probaly due to the metal in the card adapter as well as the heavier metal in the body of the D300 sheilding the transmission. I did not have any problems when shooting in the same room, so I expect that in a studio enviroment or at a trade show where you are in an open area you would not have any issues.

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Eye-Fi X2 Pro

New Toy! Tax return came back early so I decided I deserved a new toy. Picked up the Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8gb Sd card.
This is a sd card with built in wireless N, with it you can wirelessly download images directy to your pc or post the online to you flicker or other photo sharing accounts.
Setup: The software can be a bit vauge as to what information they are asking you for and the color choices they made can make the text hard to read at times however once set up you should not have to go into the software that often.
They do provide info on how to set it up with Lightroom so light room imports the photo automatically as soon as it is transfered to the pc.
The software reqires you to insert the sd card into a card reader attached to the pc to update the settings on the card for your wireless access.
The card can store settings for up to 32 different SSID’s.
The pro version supports Ad Hoc networking and hotspots however I have not gotten any of the hotspots to work correctly as of yet.
I am waiting on an sd to cf adapter to see if I can get it working with my D300 however eye-fi does not support or recommend this.
With the P7000 from Nikon it works fine. Tested it on my own wireless N network and an open network at a local coffee shop. could not get it to connect at the local starbucks.
In theory I should be able to take a number of photo’s the when my camera is in range and turned on it should send them to my laptop and my site.
Will play with this and see how it works out. One of the other features is Geotagging, now this is not a GPS but it takes a look at any wifi transmitters it can pick up an tags the photos with a geographic area, similar to the location tagging on the iPad.
One nice thing about this is if your camera gets stolen every time it gets near a hotspot turned on you will get copies of the photos taken with locations! This might make recovery possible.

All in all I am pleased with this purchase but will report on it more at a later date.

Posted from my iPad

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Nikon P7000 – My Thoughts

Well I broke down and picked up the Nikon Coolpix P7000 Camera.

It is similar in size and shape to the Canon G10-G11 series and is supposed to be Nikon’s version of same.
First Impressions.

RAW file saves are very slow – Not an Issue for me as If I am shooting Raw I will be either using my d300 or will not be in a hurry for the file to write to the card.

Ergonomics – Very good. Finaly a camera that has buttons big enought that I can change a setting without a set of tweezers to make a change. My big hands were not designed to operate Equipment designed for Smaller hands.

Flash – One of the main reasons I purchased this model. It has a hot shoe! I can use all of my Nikon Gear with it. Yes it supports the SU-800 for remote triggering of flash or I can mount the sb-600 or sb-900 directly on the camera and fire away. (Note both of those flash units work but are a bit big and unbalanced on the P7000 a better choice might be the Sb-400 however it does not support CLS)

THe Flash also brought to light one of my biggest gripes with the P7000 an issue which I hope Nikon corrects in the firmware and soon.

One of the reasons for wanting the hot shoe was to use as a trigger for Off Camera Flash. In the strobist style.
SHooting in manual with radio triggers Either Pocket Wizards or one of the many cheap E-bay Triggers (Cactus, YN RF-602, Phottix atlas and many more). I have a set of the Elinchrom BXRi Monoheads that ship with the Skyport system.

Here is where the problems start. It took me a while to figure out how to get them to trigger reliably.
1: You must set Flash control in the menu to Off. (The Nikon flashed require this setting to be on.)
2: Digital Zoom must be set to On. (The Flash/Remotes will not trigger if set to Off)

Now I don’t know about you but one of the first things I did when i bought the camera was to turn Digital Zoom Off. If I need to Crop an Image I can do it in Post production I do not need the camera to do a crop and resize for me.

It took me most of a day to realize that this was causing my problems with the flash triggering.

I contacted Nikon Support and that was another trial. Lets just leave it at the fact that I am still considering selling all my equipment and going Canon. Except I am not sure if Canon’s customer support would be any better.

Thier First response was that they do not support any non Nikon Products.

Then I gave them the senario using all Nikon products that would replicate the same issue.

Llinking the p7000 with a Nikon AS-15 Hotshoe adapter and the Nikon SC-11 PC Sync cable to the SB-900 in manual mode.
This gave the same issue as trying to use the skyport or the pocket wizard.

This was Nikon’s response.

This camera was not intended to be used with studio strobes or flash sync cables. I suggest you use a Nikon speedlight.

However now that I have gotten that Rant out of the way.
Other than the above issue I love the camera. One of the nice features is the IR remote. This camera has sensors on both the front and the back that can be triggered by the Nikon ML-L3 remote trigger.

Most of the frequently adjusted settings can be quickly accessed without going into the menu system via the Quick Menu Dial.

The 28 to 200 zoom is very smooth and covers a much better range then the Canon G11-G12 or the S95.

JPG’s are very usable at ISO 400, OK at 800 and will do at 1600. If you need Hi Iso you need to look to the cameras with larger sensor, ie. a DSLR.

So in summary, If you are not planning on using manual flash, and will only occassionally require shooting in RAW this is a great camera that feels very solid in your hand.

It is a bit bigger than most point and shoots and if you want something to slip into a shirt pocket look elsewhere.

This camera ships with an actual neck strap not a wrist strap. While it will fit into jacket pocket or bag with no problems you will not be slipping it into your jeans.