Unlimited disk for camera via Wi-Fi

[mrbryanejones]

I do quite a bit of photography where we are showing results to the subjects as we go along. Two recent examples are a track day at Goodwood Motor Racing circuit (UK) and photographing dancers before they went on stage. The way we have been doing it is to have a number of compact flash cards and keep changing the cards after each subject has been taken.

Then I had an idea. You can already get Compact Flash Wi-Fi cards for PDAs. Surely it would not be too much of a leap in technology to have a Wi-Fi Compact Flash card in the camera. A computer could have a piece of software running on it that would share out an area of disk to the Wi-Fi card. As the pictures where being taken they would be transmitted to the computer at the IP address (ie it could be anywhere on the Internet, not just the local network). To prevent pictures being lost if the camera was taken out of range of the Wi-Fi network the card would have a buffer of say 256MBytes. The moment it got back in range it would continue transmitting to the target computer.

Has this already been invented or is it something new? If it is already in existence where can I find it?

Look forward to hearing your replies.

[yonah]

Although there are Wi-Fi cards that fit into a compact flash slot, generally speaking, the device that you plug them into needs to have specific drivers on it to be able to use the card to communicate. Most PDAs with CF cards have such drivers. To my knowledge there isn't a camera that has this type of connectivity.

Personally, this won't work very well for high-res shots as the bandwidth would make it painfully slow to store pictures - which is why this is not that viable of an option for direct store to wi-fi.

My advice to you - buy a Wi-Fi enabled Compact Flash PDA - you can buy a Compaq 2215 and an SDIO wi-fi card - and then periodically use the PDA to upload shots taken with your cameras.

HTH
--Yonah
http://www.the-wolfs.com/