A Camera, a Card, a Connection

According to my Twitter followers, certain laws govern the consumer electronics industry. There’s @Slbrink’s Law: “The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the ink cartridge.” And @MichaeLVosburg’s law: “Any gadget’s ease of use is inversely proportional to the number of engineers who worked on it.” And @Invisible_Daddy’s law: “Any cool feature you try to show your spouse won’t work, discrediting your enthusiasm for your new purchase.”

Then there’s @Pogue’s Latest Law: “The more convenient a device is, the worse the audio/visual quality.”

Take the iPod, for example. Millions buy it for its convenience, despite the fact that the music files’ audio quality is usually far lower than what they would hear on a CD.

Similarly, hundreds of millions of people now take most of their photos with cellphone cameras, even though the picture quality is far worse than a real camera’s. There’s no zoom, no real flash, low resolution. You can’t photograph action without blurriness, you can’t get that soft-background look, and cameraphones are worthless in low light.

But we put up with those drawbacks, because cellphones are incredibly convenient. You always have yours with you — and, even better, you can transmit a picture or movie right from the phone. Send it to another phone, to an e-mail address, to a Web site or blog, on the spot, without even stopping at home first. That’s powerful stuff.

Nice choice, huh? You can take nice pictures that remain landlocked on the camera, or lousy ones to upload or send.

Now there’s a product that bridges that gap. You can take photos with your favorite camera, but transmit or upload them to the world from your cellphone, on the spot. It’s a memory card, of all things: The Eye-Fi Mobile X2 card ($80).

Eye-Fi cards have been around for a while. The first ones did one thing very well: they transferred photos from your camera to your computer — and online sites like Flickr or Picasa — when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot. (Yes, that’s right: the Eye-Fi folks have squeezed Wi-Fi circuitry onto a memory card the size of your thumbnail. Think about that too hard, and you’ll give yourself a headache.)

Eventually, the company took this feature to its logical conclusion: the bottomless memory card. If you’re in Wi-Fi, you can keep snapping photos. The card steadily backs them up to your computer or a Web site, and then deletes the backed-up photos from the card to make room for new ones. You never run out of card space.

Recent models have added geotagging (your geographical coordinates get invisibly stamped onto each photo, so you can view them later on a map online) and the ability to transfer photos in RAW format. All the cards are physically identical, though; you can buy a card intended for one purpose (like the Mobile X2), and then pay $30 each to add features from other cards. (If this all seems confusing, you’re right.)

But the Mobile X2 is the first Eye-Fi card that can perform its magic even when you’re not in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

After some setup, you put this 8-gigabyte card into your camera. (It’s an SD card, so it fits almost every camera on earth.) From now on, every time you take a photo or record a video, it gets transmitted wirelessly to your iPhone, iPad or Android phone — at full, beautiful quality and resolution. Once it’s there, you can e-mail it, text-message it, post it to Flickr or another Web site, and otherwise manipulate it exactly as though it had been born on that phone or tablet.

A photo takes 5 to 30 seconds to transfer, depending on the size of the photo file. (A video can take far longer.)

In essence, the Mobile X2 card turns any camera, from a cheap point-and-shoot to an expensive digital S.L.R., into a wireless camera. (I met one photographer who is using this card in his portrait studio. He has the card set up to fling each photo onto his iPad, so he can inspect his work on a much bigger, better screen than on his camera. It’s a pretty amazing setup.)

There are two bits of not-so-fine print, though, that you should consider before you shell out the $80.

If the card and your phone are both on the same Wi-Fi network, well, great. What’s really ingenious, though, is what the company calls Direct Mode: if there is no Wi-Fi network available, the card generates its own hot spot. Thanks to a free Eye-Fi app, your phone or tablet can hop onto this tiny, private network to complete the photo/video transfer. That’s how the Mobile X2 card can do its job even when there’s no Wi-Fi network around — when you’re at sea, for example, or out in left field.

So why is all this a downside? Because Wi-Fi requires power, and the only power available to the card is your camera’s battery. You can’t choose which photos and videos to transmit; all of them get backed up. (You do have control, however, over which ones get posted online; you use your camera’s Lock button to flag the ones you want shared.)

All of this Wi-Fi action burns through your camera’s battery about 15 percent faster than usual.

There’s another downside, too. Once the Mobile X2 card is up and running, it’s all automatic. But the setup process can be a bumpy ride.

Part of the reason is that so many pieces are involved: the camera, the phone or tablet and your computer.

You have to do most of the setup while the card is inserted into your Mac or PC (the card comes with a compact USB card reader). You’re supposed to install a program called Eye-Fi Center, where you teach the card about the Wi-Fi networks it may encounter — like your home network — and establish all of its settings.

Then you download the Eye-Fi app onto your iPhone, iPad or Android phone. More setup, more settings, none of which are ever explained. Incredibly, the instruction booklet that comes with the card wastes its 32 pages (in multiple languages) explaining the one thing you probably don’t need help with: installing the Mac or PC software. For the rest of the process, you’re on your own.

Instructions await online, but only if you’re smart enough to Google “Eye-Fi Mobile X2 setup,” and then click Support Center, and then click “Setting up Direct Mode.” But they’re frustrating and incomplete. For example, on the iPhone, you’re instructed to “Tap and hold the password field to paste the password” for the private Eye-Fi network. Unfortunately, the instructions never tell you where to find the password in the first place.

You should also know that the card can send your photos only to one place at a time (in addition to your computer): one phone or one tablet.

If @MichaeLVosburg’s Law is at play here, the Eye-Fi must have involved a lot of engineers.

It’s worth the calls to tech support that it’ll take you to get all of this running, though. Because once you’ve got everything in place, it really is magical. Shortly after you take a photo with your camera, a “transmitting” logo appears on its screen. (Eye-Fi, the company, has persuaded Canon, Nikon, Sony and five other camera makers to build Eye-Fi feedback indicators into their cameras.)

If you now open the Eye-Fi app on your phone or tablet, you see the thumbnail of the new photo, ready for viewing, editing or sending on to your adoring fans. You’ve achieved the previously impossible: used both your camera and your phone for what they’re best at.

And if you do have trouble setting up, just remember @2jase’s First Law: “Your kids think they know technology better than you do. And they’re right.”