I think I speak for every camera nerd out there when I say, Hallelujah!!! It’s about damn time Eye-Fi released an Ad Hoc enabled SDHC card. Live blogging will now be 100x easier.
The 4GB Eye-Fi Pro now supports RAW files on top of pre-existing support for JPEG and video files. Geotagging and Hotspot access are available on the Pro model as well. The Eye-Fi Pro is available now on Amazon and Eye-Fi for $149.
My favorite little at-home gadget is getting a shake up today. Eye-Fi’s Wi-Fi SD cards not only upload images, but now video to YouTube and Flickr. The Share Video and Explore Video cards are now 4GB standard and the existing line of 2GB Eye Fi cards received a price drop.
Sanyo Japan [JP] has announced three IC recorders that can use SD and microSD cards as recording media and are to be released in Japan November 21.
The ICR-S003M is relatively light on features (omnidirectional stereo microphones, MP3 sound recording, three recording modes) but Sanyo claims it’s “the industry’s smallest and lightest IC recorder equipped with an SD memory card slot”. It’s sized at 36.6×96mmx13.3mm and weighs 52 grams. 11 hours of audio can be stored on a 1GB SD memory card. This model will also be sold outside Japan but Sanyo neglected to say when (price in Japan: $100).
Everyone’s favorite wireless memory card is now available with four gigabytes of storage. The Eye-Fi Anniversary Edition has just been announced to commemorate one year of wireless photo slinging from the Mountain View, California-based company.
The card is selling with an MSRP of $129.99 but Costco members can get it for $99 on Costco.com – not too bad for a 4GB SDHC card with a built-in wireless chip that automatically transfers photos to your computer and 25+ online photo sharing services. You can also add automatic geotagging and/or Wayport wireless hotspot access for $14.99 per year, per service.
Note: this Newegg deal is while supplies last so when it goes live at 11:00 EST or 8:00 PST, jump on it fast. An 8GB SD card for 10 bucks is a hell of a deal, especially with free shipping.
via GearDiary
So maybe the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the G10, along with the SX10 IS just don’t scream your style. Canon understands that and has the obligatory, new Digital Elph upgrades just for you. The SD990 IS and SD880 IS both pack optical image stabilization and the DIGIC 4 image processor, but that’s where the similarity stops. Read More
I’ve always kind of wondered why more phones and media players didn’t have more built-in storage. SD is cheap, and fast enough for most low-demand data uses — mp3s, small videos, any kind of office doc — yet while my phone has a MicroSD slot, I believe its internal storage (the default for pictures, music and so on) is a whopping 16 megabytes. You’d think they’d at least have updated with the times as successive generations of easy storage got cheaper.
Well, I guess someone finally asked the right person, because the SD Card Association is announcing embedded SD functionality, something which seems like it would have been a no-brainer back in 2000. For whatever reason, it’s happening now, so you can expect storage in low-end phones to jump. Am I missing something here? All it would take to embed SD would be a controller and an interface hard-wired to a decapitated SD card. I’m guessing the capabilities have been there for years but there were licensing agreements or some such.
ADTEC have lost their collective mind, releasing new SD card readers that can be customized — no, Bedazzled — by fingernail artists to make personalized works of electronic, tacky art.
They’re big in Japan, but you know this kind of crap is going to make it across the Pacific sooner rather than later.
Pimpable MicroSD Card Reader [Akihabara!]
These SD cards just get bigger and fatter all the time — and by bigger and fatter, I mean internally. After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
This one from Panasonic, available in April, is a 32-gigabyte card. Granted, it’s $700 but it does work rather speedily with a 20mb/sec transfer speed.
There’s a SanDisk 32-gigabyte card that’ll also be out in April. At $350, it’ll be half the price of this Panasonic card but it runs a tad slower at 15mb/sec. That might not sound like a big deal but it very well could be for the kinds of people who have $350 to $700 to drop on an SD card.
Other 32-gigabyte cards should be available soon from various other manufacturers in various other formats, which should help to drop prices over the coming months.
Eye-Fi has announced that its Wi-Fi SD cards will get a “Smart Boost” update on February 12th. With Smart Boost, your card will be able to tell whether or not your computer is on and in range of your camera and, if it is, photos will be offloaded from your camera to your computer over your home network and then your computer will handle the heavy lifting of uploading the photos to your online photo-sharing site.
If your computer isn’t on, your camera will upload your photos directly to the web-based Eye-Fi service, which will then shoot the photos to your favorite photo-sharing site AND shoot them back down to your computer when it’s turned back on. Rad, no?
Hey, now THAT’S a good idea. This $99 2GB SD memory card has built in wireless.
You pop it in your camera, take some photos, and it automatically uploads (via your Wi-Fi connection) those photos to one of 17 online photo websites including Shutterfly, Snapfish, Photobucket, Facebook, Picasa, and, of course, Flickr.
Best of all, it works in any digital camera that supports SD cards. I don’t know how they crammed all that into a tiny card but, hey, I’m just a guy with a keyboard.
It’s available now at a variety of stores. Hot damn, I’m getting one.
Eye-Fi [Company Website] via Wireless-Watch.com
Why are you watching videos again?
Summer is currently in full effect. It’s hot as hell outside, the sky is beautiful, the water is warm – you need to get out there. So bring your family or some good buddies and hit the trails, slope, or beaches. Find something to do. Just remember to be equipped with the best video gear possible. Because between the 14-hour car ride to your destination and Bob falling into a patch of poison ivy, you’ll want the memories to last forever.
You thought your Wii was truly a special console, didn’t you? Sure it doesn’t play DVDs and it lacks a hard drive, but that’s ok, ’cause the Wii has a remote for a controller! Now Wii owners are finding out the hard way that not having a hard drive sucks. Jake over at 8BitJoystick.com downloaded one too many VC games and realized that his Wii channels were full and his internal storage was almost at its 512MB limit. Ouch.
It’s not like Jake went nuts and downloaded every game on Nintendo’s Virtual Console either. He just downloaded a normal amount of games like any other gamer would. The problem lies in the way Nintendo is distributing older titles. Each VC game not only includes the proper ROM file for the game to work, but it also contains an emulator as well. So when each game you download also has a program coming with it, storage is going to run out quickly.
Nintendo needs to find a new storage solution and fast if it has any hope of not pissing gamers off when they go to download new games, only to find their Wii is fresh out of room to hold them. Sure you can backup to SD cards, but that isn’t practical and it’s also expensive. Perhaps a massive USB storage solution is in the works?
My Wii is Full [8BitJoystick]
A company called Eye-Fi is looking to bring WiFi-embedded SD cards to your digital camera. Rather than spending a ton of money on a WiFi-enabled digital camera, you’ll be able to purchase an SD card that can go in almost any digital camera and will allow a WiFi connection from multiple devices.
With capacities of up to 2GB, Eye-Fi certainly has a chance of creating a new device the market will jump on. I personally would love to have one of my Casio Exilim cameras WiFi-enabled. Expect to pay $100 for a 2GB model, which is a pretty pricey for an SD card. But remember, you’re getting the joy of WiFi!
Big Daddy over at Motorola Ed Zander said that next week, his company will show off a new phone capable of playing movies at 30 frames per second in very high quality video. Then every American sighed in disappointment as he revealed that the phone would be launching in Europe. Oh well. It’s nice to dream.
Zander said that users will be able to load movies onto the phone via SD cards and that the quality of the films will be “unbelievable”. Sucks for us. Eddie also dropped some quirky facts about how 32 cellphones are sold each second, but by then everyone not living in Europe had left the conference room.
Motorola To Unveil Phone With 30-Frame Per Second Video; Movies On SD Cards [Barrons]
For the past year, I’ve spent time with numerous Casio digital cameras. The Exilim series has proven to be an excellent blend of both value and performance. A fantastic camera at a low price if you will. But camera after camera, Casio didn’t really do much to change the design of each model. At one point, the difference between a 10.1-megapixel camera and a 6-megapixel camera was virtually undetectable (well, except for the megapixel thing). But with the release of the EX-Z75, Casio has tried something new. The unit I received has a new design, a bright blue paint job, and a new UI to play with. Has Casio finally taken a step forward? Maybe. Read on to find out the entire story.
Read More
Here’s a gadget that seems pretty useful but you won’t find at the local CompUSA. Century’s SDB25S is a terribly named enclosure that you plug into an IDE cable. Inside the enclosure, you can insert up to four SD cards (2GB each max) to create one single drive using your SD cards. Too bad it costs $260, has a cap of 8GB because SDHC isn’t supported, and has issues with Windows Vista.
The multinational conglomerate A-DATA is set to roll out an SD card that uses some sort of e-ink-like display to show you just how much space you’ve got left–useful if you’ve got stacks of these things. What would be really cool is if they can fit this onto a mini or microSD. Check it out sometime post-CES.
Product Page [AData]
