But is the WiFi worth it?

Hey all,

I'm considering picking up a WiFi card for my 7Dmkii... So I have to know: is WiFi in a camera worth it?Real world opinions here. Besides transferring photos to your phone what other, if any, really useful features have those of you who have a camera that is WiFi capable found?

I don’t think it has much value. I did a trial at one of my concert venues sending images to my iPhone to upload to social media channels before intermission so that the audience could share during intermission.

Working on tiny screens doesn’t give the whole story, and the images I uploaded weren’t as good as they looked on the back of the camera or on the phone. After that I returned to taking the card out, putting into my Surface Pro tablet, finding the best images to share, light editing in Lightroom and uploading to social media channels. As a news photographer it does have some use to check in with the editor before leaving a shoot, so I’m kind of looking forward to having it on my D850 when it arrives, but I doubt I’ll ever use it for actual final file delivery.

Hi

I have had and used the Eyefi cards. I use the mobi in my one camera.

They now have the Mobil pro with more features so if you buy one get the pro.

I have not tried the other brands out.

My newer cameras have wifi and I use it when I want to post to social media or look at a photo on a bigger screen when I am out shooting.

I like Photo Shop express for doing edits.

Why post a crappy low light cell phone photo when you can post a good photo from your camera.

Brad

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I go through life shooting Snap Shots.
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I personally have no occasion to use such a thing even if it were very fast and reliable.

However, there are certainly a lot of people out there who do need it. Many would like to avoid physical tethering and this might be just the ticket or them. For instance, are you big on social media ? Do tethered shooting in a studio ? News feed of some sort ?

Apologies if this sounds rude as no such thing is intended. Regarding your specific question, I would think that if you need to ask what the uses might be then it's not for you. Generally, one would identify a need and research a solution rather than the other way around.

--
"Good judgement is generally the result of experience. Experience, unfortunately, is generally the result of bad judgement" - attributed to a whole bunch of folks

What a lot of us photographers want from wifi and what they get from it are different things!

As someone at events, I want to be able to set up a laptop - not a tablet, I've never done photo work on a tablet- and have the camera transmit the small size jpegs so they are shown and recorded on the laptop. Then during the breaks I would like to check my photos and upload them to social media. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

But the manufacturers used to charge megabucks for stuff like this and they don't want to give people too much for free, so they only do smartphone apps because they think they have to do it to compete with smartphone cameras.

And I read of a camera that didn't turn the wifi off automatically when you turned the power off... lord help us.

Bradrobb said:

Hi

I have had and used the Eyefi cards. I use the mobi in my one camera.

They now have the Mobil pro with more features so if you buy one get the pro.

I have not tried the other brands out.

Click to expand...

Whoa, EyeFi sold out to Keenai who in short order nixed the normal functionality of Eyefi cards in retail channels that were not yet registered, removed eyefi software downloads and replaced it with new software based on a subscription service. Then they backpedaled a little, but even if you want to pay a subscription to the cloud, can you trust them?

I built my own wireless solution 8 years ago for $75 that I still use in my studio with my D800 (I've used it since my D300 on up). It is based on using a pair of wireless USB2 dongles (one a transmitter, the other a receiver) that is STILL far faster than anything else on the market (480Mbps constant), but it is for short range use only (max 25 feet), still ideal for use in the studio. It was perfect for shooting un-teathered in the studio using several monolights - it allowed me to shoot portraits (or anything), send the images (even large RAW images as well as JPEG pairs) to my computer which instantly displayed them on a large flat screen TV (via Nikon Capture/2)- basically providing instant life-size live preview of each capture, which for lighting and modeling is awesome. Unfortunately those cheap USB2 dongles from Cables Unlimited are no longer available - (I bought two sets I had to adapt from AC to battery DC). Current solutions are still too slow and expensive. Here is what I built back then: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/37822806

The only thing I've seen since that might work the same as the Cables Unlimited one would be one of these, but you'd have to make the same 5v battery adapter to replace the AC power source at the camera (which is pretty easy to do): https://www.amazon.com/HuddleCamHD-HC-USB2-AIR-Wireless-Extender-Bandwidth/dp/B073RSW19H

MFL

My camera has built-in wifi, so not sure if it's the same experience as a wifi card.

But I love the wifi feature and wouldn't consider buying a camera without it. It's great for sharing a few of your best photos taken with your best camera. I know you could do that with a phone camera, but much of the fun of photography is using a fine, capable camera with carefully chosen lenses & putting thought into the composition. With camera wifi, you can retain that aspect of photography & still have some of the immediacy of sharing your pictures with friends & family via phone. Best of both worlds. It only takes a minute to transfer 1-3 pictures to my phone (maybe not even that long? I've never timed it.)

Sometimes when I travel I'll wifi my best pictures to my tablet. I can then crop & post process if desired, & now I've got a nice means of display via the tablet to enjoy the fruits of my photographic day.

I hate taking pictures with my phone, frankly. Options are too limited, poor image quality, awful shutter lag. Takes crummy pictures of the grandbabies -- not worth showing to my friends.

Don't think you'll be able to upload a whole day's shoot, though -- too slow for that.

ETA: just reread your post & realized this doesn't answer your question -- is wifi more useful beyond sending photos to a phone for sharing. Perhaps uploading to a tablet for editing & display is marginally more useful. Still, camera to phone/tablet connectivity for small batches of files is at the very least a wonderful convenience.

Schrodingers_cat said:

I personally have no occasion to use such a thing even if it were very fast and reliable.

However, there are certainly a lot of people out there who do need it. Many would like to avoid physical tethering and this might be just the ticket or them. For instance, are you big on social media ? Do tethered shooting in a studio ? News feed of some sort ?

Click to expand...

Big on social media no, but I wouldn't mind being able to share a shot or two in between bands when I shoot live sets... Which is my main reason for consideration.

Member said:

Apologies if this sounds rude as no such thing is intended. Regarding your specific question, I would think that if you need to ask what the uses might be then it's not for you. Generally, one would identify a need and research a solution rather than the other way around.

Click to expand...

The Canon wifi feature has one of two major things I was looking for: file transfer. The other was custom exposure time which, for some reason, you can't do... So I installed ML instead. I guess I was just looking to see if there were cool additional features I didn't know about.

Member said:

"Good judgement is generally the result of experience. Experience, unfortunately, is generally the result of bad judgement" - attributed to a whole bunch of folks

Click to expand...

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Kevin M. Byers
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My D750 has a nonstandard USB cable, so the wifi feature is useful when I'm away from home and want to transfer images to my laptop.

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