Isn't it frustrating when you take great pictures with your camera and then can't find a way to get them onto your computer? Sure, you can use your camera's USB cable or a card reader ... if you can find them. They're small enough that they are easily lost in the tons of cables and chargers piled in many of our drawers.
Then there's the added wrinkle that most cameras have proprietary USB jacks, meaning they don't use the same mini-USB jack that most other devices use. For each camera and other accessory, you need a different USB adapter cable just to upload files to your computer.
Today I'm going to introduce two new products that will help you overcome this problem.
The first is SanDisk's new SD Plus USB cards, which are standard media cards with a super thin USB adapter built in to them. The SD cards, which stands for Secure Digital, fit just like any other flat memory card into your digital camera.
The difference is that there's a hinge in the middle of the SD card that allows you to bend part of it back. This reveals a thin USB adapter that allows you to plug the SD card directly into your computer for easy transfer of your photo files. No more cables: you can move photos directly from your camera to your computer.
Personally, I think this is such a handy card since I have long since lost my camera's USB cable, and I always seem to forget to bring my card reader when I want to show off my latest photos.
This device eliminates all that hassle without adding more bulk to the plethora of cables/chargers/other devices that we all have already. The one downside to this product is the price, with a 2 Gb card priced at $40, compared to a normal 2 Gb card at around $20.
The other product is the Eye-Fi Wireless Card, which is also a camera-ready SD card. Here's the hook: it also has built-in WiFi for Internet access. How does this work? The card looks and functions just
like a normal SD card, so you can save pictures to it from your
digital camera.
The difference is that the card's built-in WiFi capabilities allows you to hook into an wireless internet network available and immediately
stream pictures from your camera. These can go directly to your favorite
photosharing, blogging or social networking site. Supported sites
include Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Webshots, Shutterfly,
Kodak and more.
To allow your WiFi card to stream pictures from your
camera, you need only to set up your SD card from your PC or Mac the first time you use it.
This tells the card which local wireless networks to
look for as well as the login information for the sites mentioned
above.
The downside to this product is that the WiFi card only connects to
selected networks, which means you will not be able to just walk into any Starbucks
and upload your photos to the Web.
Another issue is that the WiFi
drains your battery and does not work when your camera is off, so you
have to turn your camera on when you get home
to put your pictures online.
The biggest hurdle is once again the price: a
whopping $99 for 2 Gb. But this product shows that the future of camera connectivity
is very promising.
