I bought an Eye-Fi card from Amazon on April 8. It arrived on the 16th, and it has lived in my K30 ever since. I guesstimate that it has around 3000-4000 clicks on it.
Yesterday as I was loading some pics onto my laptop I tried putting the card into my built-in sd slot. It wouldn't go in. I took a closer look, and discovered to my horror that one of the prongs from the "grill" that lines the gold circuit contacts was bent, and was preventing the card from going into the slot. One of the other prongs had also come loose and was basically on the way to becoming bent out of shape.
Here are two pictures showing what I'm talking about. I had bent the prongs back a little further for emphasis because they wouldn't stay flat anyways and were preventing the card from being inserted into my sd card slots on my laptop/cameras.
(taken with Q + 01 Prime)
(Check the link at the bottom. It is picture 1 and picture 2.)
Despite this problem, it seems that the prongs don't really have any bearing on keeping the gold contacts in place. I snipped them off using nail clippers as close as I could to the body, and the card seemed to function just as normally after that.
(taken with K30 + Tamron 90 Macro)
(Picture 3 in the link at the bottom.)
So before I was ready to just brush this off as a bad quirk of this particular card, I decided to take a closer look at the overall body. To my horror, I found signs that the body itself was falling apart. Witness this crack at the edge of the card.
(Picture 4 in the link at the bottom.)
I've offloaded the pictures from the card and now it's just sitting in a little case. There's no way I'm putting it in any slots on my cameras or my laptop in case shards from the card splinter off and damage their innards. I'm also not going to use this card because I would hate to have the card fall apart on me and eat a bunch of pictures.
The timing of this is annoying as I am going camping this weekend and wanted to try out a dual K30 + Q setup, and now I have to buy another memory card to make that happen. However, it's also kind of a blessing in disguise, as I was just about to buy another Eye-Fi card for my Q. I don't think that will be happening though, as this incident has basically shattered my confidence in the product, and really, above all the camera bodies and lenses, it's the pictures we take that are the most important thing in photography (right?
) and I don't want to second guess the reliability of my SD cards.
I'm past the 30 day return mark for Amazon. I think I'm going to contact the Eye-Fi company directly, but I don't think I want another Eye-Fi card because of the confidence issue. A quick Google search shows that Eye-Fi cards on the whole seem to be reliable from a build standpoint as I could not find another documented instance of this happening to another person. Perhaps I just got a lemon (a $99 lemon). But now this post will be showing up when people search for how reliable Eye-Fi cards are and there will be at least one documented instance of an Eye-Fi card falling apart.
One last thing, I should add that the Eye-Fi function performed wonderfully. It took a bit to understand how to set the settings, but once I did it, it became literally a "set it and forget it" scenario. A shame about the body really.
Anyone recommend an alternative Wi-Fi SD card?
EDIT: It is a 16GB Pro X2 model Eye-Fi card.
PICTURES
Last edited by EarlVonTapia; 06-04-2013 at 04:02 PM.