As a photographer, I’ve been thrilled to see iPhones become compelling replacements for standalone point-and-shoot cameras. Our world has improved in both measurable and immeasurable ways from widespread, immediate access to quality photography; the images documenting our lives are more compelling and numerous than ever before.
But professional photographers toting DSLRs now struggle to stand out from amateurs with iPhones. The Chicago Sun-Times infamously fired its entire photography department in favor of using images from iPhones and wire services, a move mocked by other newspapers but embraced by some broadcast journalists. Fixed-lens, small-sensor iPhones can’t match standalone cameras in image quality, particularly in dark settings, but they’re hard to beat in speed and convenience.
The question is how to combine the immediacy of iPhone photography with the quality offered by superior cameras. For me, the answer has been Eyefi‘s SD cards, which wirelessly transfer a standalone camera’s photos to an iPhone or iPad for rapid editing and sharing. (See my How-To on transferring, editing, and sharing DSLR/point-and-shoot photos with an iPhone or iPad for more details.)
Eyefi’s first $100 card contained 2GB of flash memory and a Wi-Fi chip; since then, every Eyefi card has improved on the same concept, so the brand-new 32GB Mobi Pro ($100) isn’t so much a surprise as the culmination of everything the company has done before. It has the highest storage capacity, broadest file support, and easiest workflow of any Eyefi card I’ve tested. Most importantly, it brings a more durable enclosure that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any potential reader, originally introduced in Eyefi’s more affordable non-Pro Mobi cards. Read on for all the details…
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If you haven’t previously followed Eyefi’s products, here’s a simple summary: the company started out with the aforementioned 2GB card, and evolved the product line to include numerous cards with various capacities, cloud-augmented features, and price points. Today, there are effectively three versions left: the consumer-grade Eyefi Mobi, the old (and likely to be discontinued) professional model Pro X2, and the brand-new Mobi Pro. All three are class 10 cards, promising up to 23 MB/second write speeds. Bundled with a plastic card containing an activation code, Mobi was designed to be particularly easy to pair with mobile devices, quickly enabling the “shoot JPEGs on DSLR/pocket camera, share to Internet” scenario I described above. The older Pro X2 did work with mobile devices, but it was originally designed to sync JPEGs and pro-quality RAW images to computers and the cloud.
Mobi Pro combines Mobi’s easy mobile setup with all of Pro X2’s professional-grade features. It ships with the same activation code as a regular Mobi, and assumes that you’ll pair it first to your mobile device, but also includes a USB card reader so you can connect it to any computer via a home/office wireless network for tethering. Unlike a regular Mobi card, Mobi Pro will transfer both JPEG and RAW images from your camera to your device, and — if you want to do this — selectively transfer photos rather than syncing everything you’ve shot in sequential order. This requires write-locking of individual photos on the camera, a tedious process. While I’m tempted to say that a better way to support selective transfer can’t come fast enough to existing cameras, I’ve become so accustomed to using prior Eyefi cards without it that the feature will feel like a bonus when it arrives.
Although Wi-Fi pairing isn’t as easy as with recent Bluetooth accessories, Eyefi has refined the process to make Mobi Pro setup a breeze. You download the company’s newer Eyefi Mobi app, enter the activation code on the included plastic card, and watch as the app installs a provisioning profile so your iPhone or iPad trusts the card for future automatic transfers. That’s it: you’re ready to shoot on your camera and transfer to your iOS device. If you’re shooting while away from your home/office Wi-Fi network, your iPhone or iPad will quickly pair directly with Mobi Pro and start receiving photos when you open the app. (But if your iOS device is connected to another Wi-Fi network, you’ll need to tap on the card’s Wi-Fi network in your device’s Settings menu to start the transfer process.) Photo transfers are super-quick — JPEGs take two or three seconds, RAW files a little longer — and despite a 90-foot outdoor/45-foot indoor Wi-Fi broadcasting range, battery drain is surprisingly modest. The only limit is your device’s storage capacity.
While it’s not significantly different or more powerful than Eyefi’s original iOS app, the Eyefi Mobi app is more polished. Used without tweaking any settings, it serves solely as an automated conduit for transferring files from your camera into your iOS device’s Photos app. If you want to see EXIF data, crop your images, tag them, or organize them into folders, the Mobi app lets you do that. You can also choose to prevent your device from sleeping — handy if you’re doing large photo dumps — and play with settings for transferring videos, photo optimization, and uploading over a cellular connection. Most of the features and their locations within the app are intuitive.
There are only two things about the Mobi Pro experience that may qualify as minor inconveniences for some users. First, Mobi Pro’s support for RAW file transfers sort of depends on the company’s Eyefi Cloud service. I say “sort of” because the Mobi Pro card won’t transfer RAW files to a mobile device until you sign up for Eyefi Cloud — a one-year membership with free unlimited uploading is included with the card — and the synchronization process is actually a workaround for iOS file format and memory limitations. The iOS app grabs the RAW image, sends it to Eyefi Cloud, and locally converts it into a high-quality JPEG, deleting the RAW file from your device. Most users will find this to be a seamless way to shoot RAW while working within iOS memory and file type limitations to edit and share JPEGs, but after one year has elapsed, Eyefi wants $50 per year for Eyefi Cloud access. This isn’t a problem for my personal use, since my Canon 5D Mark III saves JPEGs to the Mobi Pro and RAW files to a CompactFlash card for archival purposes, but serious RAW users might not like it.
The other minor issue is durability. I’ve owned quite a few Eyefi cards over the years, and the prior-generation plastic casing had some serious problems — one or two of the plastic pin separators on the back unfortunately tended to snap off after a year or so of active use, and one of my cards’ housings actually split in two. This is now a “minor” issue rather than a serious concern because Eyefi has redesigned the housing, using a more durable plastic that feels tangibly sturdier in both the regular Mobi and the Mobi Pro than it did in the older Pro X2. Additionally, Eyefi Customer Service consistently offered hassle-free replacements when earlier cards developed issues; they neither feigned surprise nor forced me to jump through hoops before swapping broken cards for new ones. This isn’t always true with SD cards, and despite the prior issues, I’d call myself a satisfied customer.
I put it that way because Eyefi’s cards have been so incredibly useful — and used every day for my photography — that I literally would not purchase another camera without Eyefi support, unless it offered integrated wireless functionality that was markedly better. If you’re a professional user and looking for all the bells and whistles Mobi Pro offers, it’s easy to recommend even at a $100 price. But if you don’t need RAW support, your camera doesn’t assist with selective image transfers, and you’re not planning to sync from your camera to computers on your home network, the standard Mobi will do the trick, and is offered in 4GB ($30), 8GB ($40), 16GB ($60) and 32GB ($80) capacities. From my perspective, it’s hard to go wrong with either version of Mobi. Their seamless transfer functionality, improved durability, and higher capacities make them highly compelling alternatives for serious photographers.
| Manufacturer: Eyefi |
Price: $100 |
Compatibility: All iPads, iPhones, iPod touches |
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And the write speed is ______?
It’s a class 10 card, like most Eyefi cards.
The Class 10 denomination is almost meaningless these days.
Just check Sandisk memory cards, you have around 6 different Class 10 memory cards, and the range goes from 40MB/s to 95MB/s…
More specifically when you see Class 10 it just means the card will be able to transfer at least at 10MB/s (that’s where the 10 comes from).
According to this article (there is no speed specified in official spec sheet from the manufacturer), this card transfers at at least 23MB/s, this is actually much lower than most cards these days.
Also, I must point out that any decent and recent camera will include some kind of wireless capability, so, in my humble opinion, these cards will eventually become obsolete in a few years.
Just curious, do you have a DSLR? If so, which one, and how do the Mobi Pro’s specs fall short of that camera’s capabilities?
The Mobi Pro is fast enough to write huge RAW photos and 1080p videos on current-generation professional cameras from the industry’s top manufacturers. Canon’s very latest, just-announced high-end models (5DS and 5DS R) don’t ship with Wi-Fi. It’s really not the case that “any decent and recent camera” has the feature – the number is more like 1/3 of cameras, and there are a lot of complaints about Wi-Fi performance in cameras that have it… with very few complaints, comparatively, about Eyefi cards.
To be more specific, I don’t think the card capabilities are not enough. It may actually be better due to the software described in this article, which seems pretty good, specially compared to the software that I use to transfer my photos.
I don’t have a DSRL, I own a Sony Alpha A6000 which can transfer pictures wirelessly by using an application called PlayMemories Mobile. The app is actually very simple compared to what you get to use with the Mobi cards. However, it gets the job done.
Also, I must point out that given the fact that the main use of this card is to transfer pictures wirelessly, the actual speed of the card is not relevant for most users. I just wanted to point out that the Class 10 denomination is almost pointless since you can’t actually guess the speed of the card, it just serves to tell you that the card will guarantee a minimum speed of 10MB/s.
More important than the actual card speed, is the wireless transfer speed. I don’t know what’s the speed of this card for wireless transfer, but I expect it to be fast enough for most users. However I wish the product site would specify if this card supports WiFi N standard, that way we can know how fast we can expect the wireless transfer will be.
By the way, I’ve read somewhere else that the performance when using your Wi-Fi network to transfer pictures is really faster than using the Wi-Fi network created by the card. That could be most compelling reason to get this card even if your camera supports Wi-Fi transfer. Most cameras will create their own hotspots, which is a great way to transfer your pictures anywhere, but they won’t let you transfer using your own Wi-Fi network. Using an Eyefi card would be of great value for wirelessly transfering pictures much more faster when in home.
@Moises Soto It does support 802.1n
how would this be better then CamRanger?
Eyefi Mobis start at $30 and fit inside any camera with an SD card slot. CamRanger starts at $300 and looks like a gigantic battery pack that has to be carried around separately with cabling. They’re not really comparable products.
I own a CR. i hot show my CR and its not a issue with the cable. so it doesn’t need to be carried around separately. I’m just not seeing how this is all that interesting.
If you hot shoe your CR you can’t use either on camera flash or a flash trigger.
A couple of “I don’t get its”: Does it or does it not support RAW? You wrote in one paragraph that RAW takes longer to transfer to the IOS device (a big “duh”) and in another you state the app converts RAW to jpeg and then deletes it from the camera. So which is it? Given that, the difference between Mobi and Mobi Pro remains unclear.
It does support RAW natively — both for transfers to iOS and to computers. And yeah, RAW taking longer is a “big duh” for serious photographers, but a point worth making for anyone else who might be reading.
RAW is handled in two different ways based on the receiving device. On a Mac or PC, the RAW file gets transferred and left on the computer as-is. With an iOS device, the RAW file gets transferred and then processed: _the app_ converts the RAW file into JPEG so the iOS device can edit it, and _the app_ sends the RAW file to the cloud for storage, deleting the RAW file thereafter (but leaving the JPEG version). In other words, you get rapid access to the RAW file in JPEG form on your iOS device, with the ability to play with the RAW file natively on your computer later.
How does the App transfer the RAW file to the cloud? Does it wait till you have a data connection (based on a scenario where you are taking photos in the middle of nowhere) or are in an internet capable wifi network? Does this transfer then happen in the background without user intervention?
You have two options with file transfers: Wi-Fi-only, or Cellular and Wi-Fi. If you’re connected to whichever network type you’ve specified, the RAW files will be uploaded to the cloud as soon as the app is opened, and can continue even if you leave the app.
I’m looking at getting one of these for my 5D Mark III. What settings on your camera do you use to get the selective transfers? Do you have a special method that you recommend doing while shooting? I would rather not dump all of my images to my phone since when I’m out on a shoot, I take a bunch of photos and only about 10% are worth me putting on my phone.
Speaking for myself, going back into photos and locking them for this purpose is more cumbersome/time consuming than just letting all of the images stream to my iPhone. I tend to have a high percentage of usable shots to choose from and prefer to preview them on a larger screen. But I can understand why you’d do things differently if only 10% are worth transferring. Here’s the guide to setting up selective transfer: https://mobihelp.eyefi.com/hc/en-us/articles/204134144-Mobi-Pro-Selective-Transfer
Thanks for the info! I shoot mostly kids which greatly reduces the good photo chances.
FYI Jeremy: Cameras such as the Ricoh GR have additional Eye-fi menu items that become active once an Eye-fi card is inserted. This enables, amongst other options, the ability to do the selective transfer without having to use the camera’s Protect Image function.
Perhaps you could amend the article to mention this fact. :)
Is the USB reader provided 2 or 3?
I know it’s not as portable but wouldn’t something like a Kingston MobileLite Wireless G2 do the same thing for a whole lot less money and allow you to use any SD card you like? The device plus a 128 GB card set me back less than $80.
I covered the original MobileLite in the How-To article mentioned in the review, and it’s definitely an alternative, though IMO a comparatively unwieldy one. Being able to keep a card inside your camera without the need to pop it out and into a separate device (interrupting shooting) is a major benefit of Eyefi. I’ve used MobileLite and liked it, but not as much as Eyefi cards.
Has anyone timed the speed differences between the ad-hoc RAW transfers versus the “home” network RAW transfer? I’m reading some people getting about 40 second transfers on ad-hoc when shooting with a D800. Currently I’m using a regular mobi in my 5D3, sending RAWs to a fast CF card and low – medium res jpgs to the Mobi for transfer to my phone or desktop (depending on the shoot type).
By now you have probably heard that Eye-Fi is ending support for their older generation cards in September 2016. The reason for this appears to be because they want to sell you a service. These new cards require an IOS or Andriod device to communicate. The old ones would connect directly to a PC. To easily get the images from the device to a PC, they want to sell you an Eye-Fi cloud subscription. An annual subscription that does something the old cards did for free. Before, they provided a desktop application for the PC and MAC. That is being discontinued. I think Eye-Fi has completely failed to understand what people use these cards for or, worse, just want a new revenue stream rather than a highly regarded product. Many may want to use the cards to transfer images to an iPad. But others, including professional photographers, want to keep the images on a Mac, a PC or on a server. To do that, you have to buy the cloud subscription. What a great way to cheat your customers. I’ll use my X2 for as long as it works and then come up with another solution rather than support a company that so clearly disregards what it’s customers want.
These Eye-Fi Pro X2 cards are set to be made obsolete as of September 15, 2016.
Please sign the petition on change.org.
https://www.change.org/p/sales-eyefi-com-keep-eye-fi-x2-wifi-cards-active-for-10-more-years
Avoid this company like they have the Yersinia pestis or in layman terms Bubonic plague. They will abandon you the minute you have the card and I will have to say I told you so? Please dont make me do that, just do yourself a favor and just stay away and look for other options.
I have two versions of this companies products that are now being used as wedges to level my tripod. If you do not believe me just let me know I will send pictures.
Effective 9/15/16 all cards produced prior to 6/2015 are useless paperweights that are not heavy enough to hold paper down?
only an idiot would buy from Eye-Fi after the debacle with the X2 Pro cards
if you still have an X2 you can still use it and by-pass any Eye-Fi requirements
see here http://thepeakoilpoet.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/how-i-saved-my-eye-fi-x2-pro-from.html