At the COBA meeting on Wednesday evening at Stanford University I saw a demo of the Eye-Fi wireless SD card given by Ziv Gillat of Eye-Fi. The card (except for its color) looks and feels just like a regular 2GB SD card, but actually contains a processor and a complete wireless interface.

You take photos, they go onto the card, and then the card sends them to your computer via your wireless base station. Their software can then automatically upload to Eye-Fi's servers and then pass the images on to popular photo sharing sites. It all happens immediately and fairly quickly. Wireless encryption is supported.

So far they only have an SD card product, but you can use an adaptor to fit it into a CF slot. The card cannot do ad-hoc networking, so to use it with a laptop rather than a base station you need a portable wireless router. And the current implementation is JPEG only. It's clearly aimed at consumers rather than pros, but it is easy to see how a more sophisticated product for pros could be developed.

Cost? $990 per ounce.

Tags: Photography, COBA, Wireless