Synchrotech's CFMulti adapter brings Eye-Fi support to CF cameras

Been longing for Eye-Fi support in your Sony a350? Or any CompactFlash-lovin' camera, for that matter? Meet Synchrotech, your new best friend. The company famous for making incredibly useful adapters has just pumped out its latest stroke of genius, the CFMulti. As you'd expect, this card fits into traditional CF slots but enables Secure Digital cards to be read, including Eye-Fi's range of wireless SD cards. In addition to that, the device accepts standard SD / SDHC and MMC / MMC+ cards. You know you'd pay $28 for all that functionality in one tight package, right?

[Via MacsimumNews, thanks Robert]

[Rhino @ Oct 17th 2008 11:18AM]

Will it support UDMA mode etc... To make it possible have a cheap SSD based on SDHC?

[sethmo @ Oct 17th 2008 11:18AM]

Too bad it costs $79+ just for a 2gb Eye-Fi SD card. I will keep my $79 and put my $59 8gb CF card in my CF reader.

[CraigJ @ Oct 17th 2008 4:41PM]

Good luck hooking up to your network with that...

[D @ Oct 17th 2008 11:22AM]

this kind of adapter has been out for over a year. I have been using eye.fi on my canon DSLR for quite some time with it.

[Lifelion @ Oct 17th 2008 11:24AM]

Great extension for eye-fi.

But still no RAW support!

[CraigJ @ Oct 17th 2008 4:42PM]

No RAW + no Ad-Hoc = Not interested.

[tech guy @ Oct 17th 2008 11:32AM]

Great concept, not so great in practice.

I put an eye-fi in my Canon 40D using such an adapter. Everytime I turned my camera on it knocked my laptop of the WiFi network. I couldn't upload photos to this laptop because it was always knocked off the network.

Tried 2 different EyeFi devices and had an email exchange with Eyefi. I really wanted this to work because I like the idea of easily geotagging my photos. Alas, after a couple of weeks I gave up.

[tech guy @ Oct 17th 2008 11:38AM]

Let me follow up on the Eyefi post.

While I took the Eyefi back to Best Buy, I kept the CF Multi adapter and I LOVE it. My point and shoot uses and SD, my notebook has an SD slot and I just got a 16G SD card at Fry's for $29 with rebate. The world is all SD cards. I now use SD cards everywhere. This adapter works perfectly in my Canon 40D and I'm glad I bought it. I''ll never by a CF card again! Hooray!

[Philipe Caldaron @ Oct 17th 2008 2:58PM]

Re: Rhino's question about UDMA. This is from Synchrotech's FAQ:

"This question depends on the situation, but there are no consumer memory cards as fast as UDMA based CompactFlash. When performance is the most important factor, choose high performance UDMA CompactFlash cards over other memory types. For other situations, it depends on the cards being compared. Will a Class 6 SDHC card in the CFMulti perform better than a 6 year old 12x CompactFlash card? Probably. Since SDHC and similar memory types tend to be cheap, many people want to use it as a replacement device. However, the CFMulti is not intended to replace CompactFlash when performance is a key factor. Again, if you want the highest performance there is no substitute for UDMA based CompactFlash cards."

[Virtuous @ Oct 17th 2008 4:23PM]

I bought the top of the line Eye-Fi card for the geotagging feature. I tried the card with a camera that took SD. It didn't work then, but their firmware update may fix this problem.

[D @ Oct 17th 2008 6:30PM]

Very strange - I've been using this on my network with 3-4 other computers with no issues at all. Perhaps a wireless router misconfiguration? Or maybe a problem with the eye-fi PC software that launches when photos are being uploaded from the camera....

[jhracer3 @ Oct 17th 2008 11:40AM]

Engadget has really been slipping latley. I bought one of these about 2 years ago to use with my 30D, since SD cards are so much cheaper than CF cards. How is this news?

[Doug @ Oct 17th 2008 11:54AM]

I think this is a newer version of their adapter. It seems like this one fits CF Type I slots, whereas their previous adapter only fit in Type II slots.

[Mark @ Oct 17th 2008 12:45PM]

Funny, the link says "CFMulti CompactFlash Type II to Eye-Fi™ + Multi-Card Adapter"

Again though, not new. Amazon has had this for a while, but don't pay the $48.99 on that page- click through the "Used & New" link for a new on for $20.

[TIMMAH! @ Oct 17th 2008 3:39PM]

Are there any issues with transfer speeds with using adapters like this? Don't the better CF cards have faster transfer rates than the SDHC cards right now?

[larry gonzales @ Oct 17th 2008 8:22PM]

Eye-Fi has information about the use of SD to CF adapters with Eye-Fi Cards. If you are considering using an adapter with and Eye-Fi Card you might want to check this out. http://support.eye.fi/faq/troubleshooting/#faq-388

[JustinD @ Oct 17th 2008 11:21PM]

Jobo makes one too, things have been around since SD's were introduced...