Similarly, hundreds of millions of people now take most of their photos with cellphone cameras, even though the picture quality is far worse than a real camera battery. There’s no zoom, no real flash, low resolution. You can’t photograph action without blurriness, you can’t get that soft-background look, and camera phones are worthless in low light.
But we put up with those drawbacks because cellphones are incredibly convenient. You always have yours with you — and, even better, you can transmit a picture or movie right from the phone. Send it to another phone, to an email address, to a website or blog, on the spot, without even stopping at home first. That’s powerful stuff.
Nice choice, huh? You can take nice pictures that remain landlocked on the camera, or lousy ones to upload or send.
Eventually, the company took this feature to its logical conclusion: the bottomless memory card. If you’re in Wi-Fi, you can keep snapping photos. The card steadily backs them up to your computer or a website, and then deletes the backed-up photos from the card to make room for new ones. You never run out of card space.
But the Mobile X2 is the first Sony DSC-P10 Battery that can perform its magic even when you’re not in a Wi-Fi hot spot.
After some setup, you put this 8-gigabyte card into your camera. (It’s an SD card, so it fits almost every camera on earth.) From now on, every time you take a photo or record a video, it gets transmitted wirelessly to your iPhone, iPad or Android phone — at full, beautiful quality and resolution. Once it’s there, you can email it, text-message it, post it to Flickr or another website, and otherwise manipulate it exactly as though it had been born on that phone or tablet.
In essence, the Sony DSC-P8 Battery turns any camera, from a cheap point-and-shoot to an expensive digital SLR, into a wireless camera. (I met one photographer who is using this card in his portrait studio. He has the card set up to fling each photo onto his iPad, so he can inspect his work on a much bigger, better screen than on his camera. It’s a pretty amazing setup.)
If the card and your phone are both on the same Wi-Fi network, well, great. What’s really ingenious, though, is what the company calls Direct Mode: If there is no Wi-Fi network available, the card generates its own hot spot. Thanks to a free Eye-Fi app, your phone or tablet can hop onto this tiny, private network to complete the photo/video transfer. That’s how the Mobile X2 card can do its job even when there’s no Wi-Fi network around — when you’re at sea, for example, or out in left field.
So why is all this a downside? Because Wi-Fi requires power, and the only power available to the card is your camera’s battery. You can’t choose which photos and videos to transmit; all of them get backed up. (You do have control, however, over which ones get posted online; you use your camera’s Lock button to flag the ones you want shared.)
There’s another downside, too. Once the Sony camera battery is up and running, it’s all automatic. But the setup process can be a bumpy ride.
Part of the reason is that so many pieces are involved: the camera, the phone or tablet and your computer.
You have to do most of the setup while the card is inserted into your Mac or PC (the card comes with a compact USB card reader). You’re supposed to install a program called Eye-Fi Center, where you teach the card about the Wi-Fi networks it may encounter — like your home network — and establish all of its settings.
