I was looking around on Saturday at the various SD cards for my Canon 500D. I thought that since there are these new fangled wifi-enabled ones, I should consider getting one of those.
My enquiries in Funan Centre initially began at Challenger. They had a 8GB model for S$79 which I thought was very expensive (not that I did any check on the costs yet) and enquired if there were bigger capacity ones. The store assistant said that there are, but they don’t have any in stock.
Great, I thought. I will use the S$79 as my upper limit for this and went from store to store. Funny that some camera stores don’t carry these devices – why that would be the case eludes me, but I reckon, those stores don’t want the extra hassle of having to understand how wifi works!
Finally, I came across Song Brothers (2nd floor, Funan), who not only had the Toshiba 16G models in stock for S$75, and another from PQI, called PQI Air Card for $68. Both were rated at 16GB. Looking at the cheaper one I decided not to get it because the brand was new to me. So, I settled for the Toshiba FlashAir 16GB class 10 SD card with WiFi capabilities. The card is a SDHC – Secure Digital High Capacity model.
The Obligatory Review:
This card is white in colour and when you insert into the camera (or any SD card reader), the wifi hotspot fires up. The SSID takes the form of “flashair_WifiMACAddress”, which in my case is “flashair_e8e0b79af4fc”. Pretty cool I’d say. They have a Android app as well. Even if you don’t use the app, you can connect to this SD card if your device has a wifi capability. All you then need to do is to attach to that SSID and in the browser of the device, go to: http://flashair/.
What you will see is the contents of the DCIM directory on the SD card. You can then download the contents. Nice. What I like about this is that the card does not need to connect to some external wifi access point and no need to connect to any server to make the contents available.
For the purposes of extracting the images out of the card, this method works very well. You can use it in any place so long as your other device can connect to the card via wifi. No dependence on wifi infrastructure and other server systems is very good.
What would be useful is the app on the Android to have some extra cleverness and be able to pull files out of the card and send it to other destinations and not only on the Android device (phone, tablet etc), although I reckon if you pull the images and put them into the folder on your Android device that is set up to upload to picasaweb (for example), then that would suffice. In any case, the code for the Andrioid app is not available – which is pity – for I am sure there will be clever tweaks done to it to make it very useful.
I must note that when I used the card at an event where my older son was graduating from Secondary 4 at SJI, the photos and videos were saved very quickly and at no time did I have to wait before the next shot, all because it is a class 10 card. Nice.
The file structure of the card is as follows:
./SD_WLAN:
216 Mar 11 CONFIG./MISC:
./DCIM:
100__TSB./DCIM/100__TSB:
128751 Mar 11 2013 FA000001.JPG./GUPIXINF:
32768 Mar 11 2013 CARDICON./GUPIXINF/CARDICON:
12021 Mar 11 2013 ICON_128.PNG
1800 Mar 11 2013 ICON_32.PNG
1250 Mar 11 2013 ICONINF.TXT
The CONFIG file is what that gets read and worked with by the Wifi stack. The contents of that file is:
[Vendor]
CIPATH=/DCIM/100__TSB/FA000001.JPG
APPMODE=4
APPNETWORKKEY=**********
VERSION=F19BAW3AW2.00.01
CID=02544d535731364708d085847800d401
PRODUCT=FlashAir
VENDOR=TOSHIBA
MASTERCODE=40b0fac41a58
LOCK=1
The default wifi key is 12345678 which gets replaced by the * as shown in the APPNETWORKKEY above when the card is first inserted and switched on. I cannot find where the actual value is kept for later use. I am sure that there are some hidden areas that the actual key is kept at. Perhaps the wifi electronics has some flash storage for that. I will run testdisk on the card to see what can be found.
I am indeed pleased to see Toshiba setup and provide a lot of details at a new FlashAir developers site and all the configurable details are explained in the tutorials. This does look very, very promising and I am sure that there will be plenty of places that Toshiba’s FlashAir can be deployed, way beyond making conventional DSLRs wifi enabled devices.
All in, I am quite pleased with the wifi card. And 16G is a decent size but with the wifi capability, it does make the use case very interesting.
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You are not alone, me too is having problems with Eyefi cards.Also I dislike their software and the fact that you need to login to be able to make changes to the eyefi card settings..It would be nice if DPReview could do a review on these new wifi sdhc cards.
Good to know the Flashair works with Canon 500D. It’s not in the compatibility list, only 550D onwards
hi i recently bought a flashair wifi card for my canon 550d however i was unable to connect it to my iphone thru wifi. i cannot find the wifi function in my dslr. any advice? thanks much.
Jasmine,
Hi. I guess you misunderstood how this card works. The card has a self contained hotspot that you would connect to. The camera is oblivious to that feature. You’d connect to that hotspot from your devices.
hi does this mean my iphone will be able to sense the hotspot thru the app, once i insert the sd card into my dslr?
Well, yes. Read the documentation if it is not clear.
Hi,
I have recently bought the card however my phone cannot detect the “wifi” when the card is inserted into my camera. My camera is under the compatibility list. Do we need to activate the card or what so ever before using?
The way this works is that when you have the card in the camera and the camera is turned on – that is important – then you would see a default SSID (flash……) or something like that. It would be listed on your card. Then from your wifi device (laptop/handphone) you connect to it and with the flashair application for Android (I am sure that there is one for the Apple phones) you can then interact with the card. The key thing is that the camera has to be ON or else the card gets no power and nothing happens.
I just bought the 64gb card today and my 500d isn’t able to read the card – any ideas? My laptop can read the card fine.
Good question. Does Toshiba have any information on the cameras it can used on?