Tethering for K7 and others - sort of. Eye-Fi is OK.
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967 posts
20 years
Virginia,
USA
In the end, it seems like a useful alternative to tethering for the K7 and other cameras that do not have a tethering option.
No, you cannot control the camera in any way (no iPhone app for us, argh!) but for getting photos off your camera to the PC so that clients can see photos right away, this works well. It is nice that I do not need my assistant (er, um, wife) to swap out cards and download photos while I'm taking photos. And I don't have to re-train her on each outing on how to import photos from the card.
Transfer speed form the card through the network is about 1.5MB/s. So regardless of 802.11n or g network, the speed of the card is going to be the limiting factor. Comes out to about 5 seconds per photo with JPGs from the K7.
I save photos to the card in DNG+JPG and have only the JPGs upload to my laptop.
As for writing to the card itself, it is a class 6 card and real world write speed is about 6MB/s. So that is as expected.
Adobe Bridge/LightRoom of course pick up those photos automatically without problems. So this is an acceptable solution.
Sadly, the software design and stability for configuring the card is atrocious!!
If you can bear to read my sob stories, trying to get the darned thing to work, start about half way down page three of this posting. (I won't repost all my troubles here)
http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-video-forum/85807-wireless-video-uploads-eye-fi-pro-x2-3.html
Once configured, and you get used to how they think things should work, it works quite well.
Outside of the configuration software, the card uploads to the server with very few problems.
Luckily I should not have to make use of the software except in very special cases.
If you can get your hand on the card, I would suggest it.
$150 is a bit expensive, but it will save a lot of time and effort through the year for shooting and eventually be worth it. (I do some jobs for pay, but not a lot.... your milage may vary. )