Eye-Fi and other bizarrities of the digital age

On the face of it, an eye-fi card sounds ideal - seamlessly upload images to Flickr and Picasa while walking around town. The reality is painfully different.

On a whim, when one of the office supply shops was closing, I went in and purchased their very last Eye-Fi card and slipped it into my car video camera (I have a DV camera on my dashboard to record idiots doing stupid things). When parked for the night, the car is well within range of my wifi. The card could not upload a thing as its wifi was too poor.

As the card is only produced as Secure Digital instead of Compact Flash, I had to obtain a converter to use it in my camera. It didn't seem to get on too well with my camera or was it the converter and thus was unusable.

Out of curiosity I dug out one of my infrequently used surveillance cameras which takes an SD card and tried it in that. No go - that didn't seem to get on too well either. I moved my car camera indoors to within 10 feet of my router and it picked up my router then began to transfer with painful slowness, one of the videos. A VGA video that took 2 minutes to record would take 10 minutes to upload.  That wasn't too promising.

In the end I put the card on ebay and sold it for pretty close to what I paid for it in the closing sale and enclosed the warranty information too. The buyer seemed happy enough. I'm glad I'm shot of it.

This brings me onto those SD to CF converters. They don't actually seem to be that reliable. I had to have two before I got one that only kinda-sorta worked.

Standardisation seems to have gone right out of the window - a different charger needed for every battery. Every camera takes a different battery - each model from each manufacturer takes a weird new battery - just like mobile phones.

The only positive thing to have happened in the past few years is that European governments got stroppy with the manufacturers of electronics and demanded standardisation with chargers. Hence most chargers now use micro USB connectors. That makes a load of sense though mini-USB would have been more robust and easier to insert. I wish they would get stroppy with them over batteries and demand standard battery sizes. I remember when the standard was 6v lantern battery, 9v PP3, D, C and AA and no other batteries were used. A standard for watch batteries would be good too - there are way too many varieties around. When the conversion charts couldn't find the battery in my watch, the lady in the shop and I started studying the available batteries for voltage and dimensions before selecting one that seemed to fit and work.

There's a lot in this new electronic age that just doesn't quite work. Eye-Fi is one of those things.

An open letter to Canon

Dear Canon,

For years we have used your products but you have started to lie on your laurels. The past 5 years has brought out nothing new and nothing really worthwhile.

Sure - you've rehashed the 5D several times, rehashed the 20D many times as well as rehashing the Digital Rebel many times. These are just rehashes of tired old products. A two year old could have been more innovative.

I am an avid photographer. I love photography. I am very disappointed by the cameras available in 2014 as they are so little different (insignificant tweaks excepted) from my 8 Megapixel 30D. When I go out taking photographs, do I take my 30D? Hell no. I'm more likely to use my phone camera (which is also 8 megapixel). Yes the 30D images are clearer and technically better. The problem is that the 30D and none of the current Canon line-up really cut it any more. I certainly wouldn't spend money on something that's not really any different from my 30D.

What can you do to rescue the situation? Think about it - a camera manufacturer whose offerings are eclipsed by a mobile phone camera! Let me offer you some suggestions and explain why my mobile phone is my camera of choice.

• My phone is small and almost always in my pocket. You need to make your cameras and lenses smaller. That Canon EOS M was an April Fool's joke, wasn't it. You do have something better that you're waiting to release that's actually compact, don't you?
• My phone puts GPS coordinates on every picture regardless of whether I'm in a cellular coverage zone or not. None of the current Canon cameras do that. Sure - you sell a GPS add-on unit that makes you look greedy and incompetent. GPS is just an itty bitty little chip that would run happily off the camera battery. I'm certainly not paying $1K+ for a camera then God knows how much extra for an add-on GPS unit that should have been built-into the camera.
• My phone uploads images via wifi as I pass through a wifi hotspot so that when I get to enter my blog, I can just select an image to include easily without having to mess about with moving my memory card from the camera to a reader or connecting my camera to the computer via a cable. It's all done wirelessly and before I even sit down. Sure - I could use one of those Eye-Fi thingies to do it and in fact I actually had one but found it so poor in use that I threw the miserable thing in the trash.

I suggest, Canon, that you pull your finger out and get to work. It's time to stop resting on those laurels - they're flat enough already. You need to start doing the following (perhaps some other manufacturer will do it first and I'll end up switching brands):

• Put a GPS logger into each camera
• Put a wifi connection into each camera. Bonus points if it works automatically with all wifi hotspots worldwide without needing a touch screen.
• Make a truly smaller mirrorless camera. I'm sorely tempted by the Nikon 1 system and that's a big hint about the direction I could well go in.
• Do some genuine innovation. Slightly bigger sensors, slightly more megapixels, live view - they don't count - that's just playing games.
• Invest in LED flash units.

Take note, Canon, I'm watching you closely and will happily jump ship if there's no great improvement from you when my 30D dies. I simply don't care about losing money selling the flashes and lenses - they've lost so much value already that I just don't care any more.

 

The Yellow Pages is something that's well past its sell by date. This is what happened to the Yellow Pages that was delivered to my house. I have no need for a chunky great lump of rainforest that's heavy and tricky to handle.

I'm amazed that such a waste of resources continues to be produced. All of these chunky great directories end up in the trash just like this one. I hate to think how many trees are murdered just to produce landfill like this. If I had a fireplace, it would probably have made excellent kindling but I don't so it just becomes landfill.

I rather suspect that if Canon doesn't shift its collective arse and produce cameras that are as easy to use and as useful as a mobile phone camera, that Canon will become a mere footnote in history.

Photography 101 - Finances

Why you should not spend money on photography if your intent is to make money from it. Included is an answer to criticisms of the previous video.