Geekido

One facet of the Eye-Fi was getting it to work with our new Pentax Optio W90 camera.

In this camera, the Eye-Fi card has to be turned on in the settings. Unfortunately, every time the camera was powered off, it would lose this setting, so in essence we would have to turn on Eye-Fi in the camera whenever we wanted to use it.

Fortunately, Pentax fixed this with a firmware update, available at http://www.pentax.jp/english/support/digital/optiow90_s.html. The firmware update went smoothly for me, and did fix the problem.

A few things to note with this camera, per the same firmware download page,

• the Endless Memory feature of the Eye-Fi is NOT supported,
• Eye-Fi transfer won’t happen once the battery level hits yellow.

[UPDATE 7/26/2010] A few notes to the notes…

• according to Eye-Fi, Endless Memory is a function of the card and IS supported on the Pentax,
• in practice I have found that the transfer doesn’t stop until the battery level hits red.

I’ll have to try out endless memory for myself to see how it works, and report back. Not the easiest thing to test with an 8GB card, though.

I don’t feel like taking the time to write a coherent article on this topic, so I’m just going to throw whatever thoughts are in my head out as they come to me, over several posts.

As part of her Mother’s Day present, when she got a new camera, my wife also got an 8GB X2 (not Pro) Eye-Fi card. If you’ve never heard of an Eye-Fi card, it’s an SD card that has built-in WiFi, so can transfer pictures to your computer wirelessly, and upload pictures to photo sharing sites while on the road when a WiFi hotspot is available.

We’re using the card in our Pentax Optio W90, with an older MacBook Pro holding our iPhoto ’08 photo library. Over several posts I’ll note some likes, dislikes, and gotchas we’ve experienced in the following areas:

• Using the Eye-Fi with the Pentax Optio W90
• Using the Eye-Fi on a Mac with iPhoto
• Configuring the Eye-Fi for wireless networks, and some of the limitations
• Using the Eye-Fi to upload to Facebook

Here’s a picture of the Eye-Fi card. It’s the same size as a standard SD Card. I’ve included a normal US penny for size comparison. (And yes, I really should have cropped the photo.)