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Review and comparison of the new Transcend 16g Wi-Fi Class 10 card vs the Eye-Fi Pro X2 Class 6 Wi-Fi card. This is going to be a top level review and not an exhaustive review of each card's features. Hopefully it will give you some information you haven't read elsewhere so to aid in your purchase decision.
I've had the Eye-Fi for a while so I am a bit more familiar with it but even saying that, the Eye-Fi is a much more mature piece of hardware and software.
What I like the best about the Eye-FI is that it can operate autonomously, uploading photo's to Facebook through your phone without any intervention by the user. The Trancend card, although newer and faster, requires the user to select, download and then share (upload) the pictures to your account. For me, the ability to upload to Facebook is what I'm looking for and I prefer the unattended operation of the Eye-Fi. You may feel differently.
First, let's look at the card's memory speed. Neither card is fast but the Class 10 Transcend is quite a bit faster than the Class 6 Eye-Fi
Using CrystalDiskMark as the benchmark, I recorded the following results.
Transcend 16g Class 10
File size 500mb
Seq Read 20.55mb Seq Write 17.56mb
512K Read20.06mb 512k Write 0.598mb
4K Read 2.397mb 4k Write 0.006mb
4k QD32 Read 2.421mb 4k QD32 Wrt 0.006
Eye-Fi 8g Class 6
File size 500mb
Seq Read 17.22mb Seq Write 13.49mb
512K Read16.40mb 512k Write 1.904mb
4K Read 2.592mb 4k Write 0.017mb
4k QD32 Read 2.749mb 4k QD32 Wrt 0.017
And for comparison.
SanDisk Extreme Pro 16 GB SDHC Class 10 UHS-1
Seq Read 90.21mb Seq Write 81.06mb
512K Read73.33mb 512k Write 8.106mb
4K Read 3.237mb 4k Write 1.484mb
4k QD32 Read 3.062mb 4k QD32 Wrt 1.136
As you can see from the above data the Transcend wins the speed race although neither card is speedy as compared to the Sandisk.
Next is setup. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here and there is a lot of detail which is outlined in each card's user guide. The Eye-Fi is set up by plugging the card into the included card reader and into your computer's USB port. You then log into the card via your browser and Eye'Fi's web page and set up the card for your desired operation. As I said earlier, the Eye-Fi has been around longer and is much more mature so you have a lot more control over what the card does when you ask it to transfer a photo.
After some trial and error with the Transcend, mostly centered around keeping it powered up while I was configuring it, I decided to try setting up the Transcend the same way, while plugged into my computer's card reader. That was the ticket, it allowed me to get everything working without worrying about the card shutting down while in the camera.
Advantage goes to Eye-Fi here, not only for the more mature utilities but also because the Eye-Fi card is recognized by my Nikon D600's firmware and the camera knows too keep power to it when the card needs to connect and transmit. The Transcend requires a lot of power and I discovered that I either had to keep the Nikon D600 in the "Live View" mode to keep the card powered or change the Custom Setting C2, Standby Timer, to some long period of time, like 5 minutes, to give me enough time to configure and transmit.
Operation:
I like to run both cards in the "Internet" mode as opposed to peer to peer. This way I set my phone to be a WiFi hotspot, connected to the internet via my mobile broadband connection. I install the Wifi card in my second SD slot and set that slot for use as overflow so that normally my photos are saved to the first card slot in which I have my fast Sandisk. I then go about my shooting. With the Eye-Fi card my work flow is to look at the pictures I took and "protect" those that I want the Eye-Fi to upload. Then when I'm ready to upload I simply use my camera to copy the protected photos to the second card slot...the Eye-Fi card, at which time the Eye'Fi knows to upload those photo's to my Facebook page and mark them as private so only I can see them. It does all this without intervention on my part. My camera has some really great built in photo editing utilities so I really do not need to post process on my phone or tablet so having the Eye-Fi work autonomously is great for my workflow.
I would do almost the same thing with the Transcend, would copy the photos to the second card, the Transcend. Then I would have to use my phone to select and download those pics to my phone. Once that was complete I could use either the Android Wi-Fi SD app or Facebook, or Flickr, or whatever, to transfer the photo's to my account.
There are many more features to the Eye-Fi card including Geocaching and endless memory so I suggest you go to their website and investigate all it has to offer before you make up your mind as to which card to purchase.
The Transcend card does have some potential and because I only paid $39 for it I plan on keeping it. It will be interesting to see how often Transcend updates the firmware and how many more features they can get into this card and mobile apps. I didn't mention the Transcend's "Shoot and View" option because my D600 has a great display but if your on camera display makes it difficult to see what you just did, the Shoot and View option may be important to you.
For me, the winner is the Eye-Fi hands down and I eagerly await the next generation of this card.
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