D810 and Eye Fi Mobi

I recently purchased a D810, and, not sure what else to do with the SD slot, I also bought an eye Fi mobi 8gb card.

I did consider the Pro Eye Fi card but the ability to transfer raw files is meaningless when it goes so slow. USB 3 is a much better way to send a 40MB or bigger raw file. since I only purchased it to send small jpeg 8 GB is more than enough room. If it fills up on a shoot I can just delete all the files since they have already been viewed on the tablet and the raw files are on the CF card.
Over all I am pretty pleased with the card, though I have yet to use it on a shoot with a client or art director present to view the images.

Speed is not as fast as I would like but since the smallest jpg the camera can record is 9mp it was expected. Reviews I had read before buying suggested about 1MB/s transfer speed. This is about accurate, except since the connection has to be reestablished if the camera goes to sleep the first shot usually takes about 30 seconds or more. In addition to this, lag is also added when when I access the menu or play back the images. The activity light on the back of the camera blinks for longer before the screen comes on. The is not every time however, after doing it once the next time the menu is accessed will be just as quick as when the eye fi is not installed.

Apart from the initial lag my only gripe is on the Nikon side of the equation.
I have set the camera to record raw to the CF and Jpeg to the SD thus sending the jpegs trough the Eye Fi. However if I turn off jpgs then the camera saves a raw file to both the CF card and the SD. Why it defaults to this and no overflow i don't understand. Plus, this is annoying because it means that if don't need the Eye Fi it will still fill up with files and once full the image counter shows 0, even if there is still room on the other card. If there is a fix for this I would love to know it. It woulds be great to be able to leave the eye fi card in the camera when I'm not using it but I can't because of these draw backs.

Has anyone else had experience with this set up? Id like to hear about it and know of any work-arounds for the issues I've described.

I can only help you with the first part, if you find it annoying that the camera goes to sleep and the connection has to be reestablished, just go to C2 and set it to "NEVER".

My salute to your courage!

I will keep an eye to this post since I am interested in doing the same in the future. But for now, I simply take out the SD Card and retrieve the data on my Macbook Pro as simple as that.

Wish you all the best!

EchoCharlie

Ckatt said:

Speed is not as fast as I would like but since the smallest jpg the camera can record is 9mp it was expected. Reviews I had read before buying suggested about 1MB/s transfer speed. This is about accurate, except since the connection has to be reestablished if the camera goes to sleep the first shot usually takes about 30 seconds or more. In addition to this, lag is also added when when I access the menu or play back the images. The activity light on the back of the camera blinks for longer before the screen comes on. The is not every time however, after doing it once the next time the menu is accessed will be just as quick as when the eye fi is not installed.

Click to expand...

I don't have an answer to your question. But just to make a general comment on the speed issue for others. I have the Pro X2 version. I found that with the D8xx series the jpeg size really needs to be small (like you said) and the quality also needs to be set to low for acceptable transfer speeds for what I want to use it for (around 2-3 seconds). I'm sending to a tablet for larger immediate viewing by me or the client. I do not use any of the jpeg files so the small size and quality setting is fine. I use the RAW for actual processing.