Hands on: Beyond photography

If the wireless network is using security, you can choose from the authentication and encryption options mentioned above before entering the key and a hidden SSID.

Characters are selected from a page using the 40D’s joystick or control wheels.

You can select a dynamic or manual IP address before the unit attempts to pair with your PC – you’ll need to run the WFT pairing utility supplied with the 40D to complete the process.

You can, of course, save your settings for future use, and the unit offers five sets.

Wireless tests
To test the EFT-E3’s wireless performance, we connected it to an existing network based on a Netgear DG834N wireless router.

The network implemented WPA2-PSK authentication with AES encryption, along with a hidden SSID and Mac address filtering.

Once we’d included the WFT-E3’s Mac address in the router’s filtering list and gone through the process described above, it connected to the network without a problem.

With the settings saved it took about seven seconds to establish a connection following a cold power-up or wake from power save.

We timed how long it took to wirelessly transfer a 1GB Compact Flash card of images to a computer on the network: 167 files measuring 925MB in total.

Note that when the camera is connected to a network, you don’t see it listed under My Computer; you’ll need to use the supplied EOS Utility to connect and download the images or initiate the transfer from the camera.

At a distance of about 1m from the router, the file transfer using the EOS Utility took 10 minutes and 54 seconds.

With the camera relocated to 16m away, outside the building in a garden and showing two bars of coverage, the same file transfer took almost 50 per cent longer: 15 minutes and 11 seconds.

The same process performed with the EOS Utility and a USB2 cable took two minutes and 28 seconds.

The USB cable allows you to drag files from My Computer, which took one minute and 53 seconds.

The disadvantage of the USB cable is its short length, but the WFT-E3 also supports a wired Ethernet connection, so we plugged in 10m of Cat-5 and timed four minutes and 28 seconds for the same file transfer using the EOS utility.

So the wireless connection was considerably slower in practice but it gives you convenience and flexibility on distance.

It’s also fair to say you probably wouldn’t be using wireless to transmit a card’s worth of images, so we performed more tests shooting one image at a time using the remote control software to record the files directly onto the computer’s hard disk.

We set the 40D to record a large JPEG plus RAW file, representing 14MB of data for the composition in question.

At a distance of 1m, the transfer took 8.3 seconds. At 16m it took 14.5 seconds.

The furthest we could establish a connection was about 35m from the router, which saw the process take about three minutes.

The same process took 2.5 seconds over USB and 3.7 seconds over Cat-5.