Figure 11-1: You can see two different screens when you hit the MENU button, depending upon the setting of the Tile menu function.
Menu Position MENU --> 2 --> Upload Settings
What it Does Enables or disables transmitting for a 3rd party SD card called “Eye-Fi”
Recommended Setting On, unless you’re on an airplane.
(NOTE 1: This feature will only appear if an Eye-Fi card is inserted into the memory card slot of your camera.)
(NOTE 2: Given that the camera has a Wi-Fi feature built right in, it kind of eliminates the need for an Eye-Fi card. On the other hand, the Eye-Fi card allows you to post directly to social media sites and you don’t have to deal with PlayMemories Home to receive your transmitted images.)
Eye-Fi (www.Eye.Fi) is a brilliant SDHC card which packs in a standard 8 – 32 gigs of memory and a Wi-Fi transmitter – all in a tiny little package! With this card in your camera you can automatically upload your images to sites such as flickr or Facebook (or your own FTP server) from any WiFi hotspot in the world, or automatically download directly to your local hard drive when near your WiFi router. Some models also employ geotagging using an imprecise service called Skyhook which attempts to map Wifi Hotspots to geographical locations.
If the card is inserted in the camera’s memory slot, then this menu function appears and it allows you to turn off the card's radio transmitter to save battery power. Once the card is properly configured and then inserted into your camera, the only options for this feature are “On” and “Off”. The best reasons to turn it off is either to save battery power, or keep it from transmitting (which may be a problem on airplanes).
Endless Memory Mode: From the manual: “This product does not support the Eye-Fi ‘Endless Memory Mode’. Make sure that Eye-Fi cards that you insert into this product have “Endless Memory Mode” turned off.” |
Menu Position MENU --> 2 --> Tile Menu
What it Does Allows you to see what the original NEX camera menus looked like, and provides a means of turning them off forever
Recommended Setting On (personal preference)
Figure 11-1: You can see two different screens when you hit the MENU button, depending upon the setting of the Tile menu function. |
When the first Sony E-mount cameras were introduced, they were aimed at a demographic who had previously used smartphones as their primary camera. And so Sony decided “Why not make the user interface similar to that of a smartphone so users would feel more comfortable with it?” You can see an example of it in Figure 11-1. All it does is present you with a high-level screen, asking “which menu screen do you want to jump directly to?”
In previous ebooks I recommended that this feature be turned off, since it just threw up one more obstacle to getting to the setting I sought. But now with the number of menu subpages increasing as it has (9 in the Camera menu; 8 in the Gear menu) I actually find it takes fewer button presses to get to where I’m going when I’m presented with this high-level navigation layer.
If you’re just learning the camera, and are playing with a lot of menu functions, it would make sense to keep this off since with that setting you’ll go back to the menu page you were on when you hit the MENU button again.