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I'm searching for a mid to high-end mirrorless camera that can connect to an existing WiFi network and has a publicly documented control protocol. Note that such information is hard to find, because they usually just say "WiFi connectivity" in the specs and then one has to dig deeper to understand what that means.

What I've found so far includes:

  • Fujifilm X-T1: Good camera, but can be used only with proprietary software running only on Windows and mobile.

  • Sony Alpha A7*: Has a good well-documented protocol, but apparently it works only as an access-point, thus I cannot connect multiple such cameras to the same PC simultaneously, or connect it to an internet connected laptop.

I want to admit that these requirements aren't necessarily practical, but it's a matter of voting with the money for the guys who do the right things.

Any recommendations?

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  • How many cameras do you want to connect to? In the case of the Sony you theoretically could add a separate external WiFi dongle for each camera that you wanted to connect to and force a 1-to-1 connection between a dongle and camera. – Peter M May 2 '15 at 20:41
  • @PeterM: I can, but it is a hack. In fact Sony is currently the closest to my requirements I've found. But I find the idea that each camera is an access-points a bit perverted (there are no technical difficulties to do it otherwise), which is why I'm asking whether there are some which do have this capability. – ybungalobill May 2 '15 at 20:51
  • Don't call it a hack - call it a creative networking solution. But yeah .. Sony didn't design the network interface for your use-case, so there will always be an element of hack in any multi-camera solution from them. But as I have no idea about what is the current level of networking and protocols in cameras, I can't add anything more. – Peter M May 2 '15 at 20:56
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    How about an Eye-Fi sd card eyefi.com instead of a whole camera? If yes, I could search for one with a documented api. github.com/dtanaka/cloud-api-doc – cybernard Jan 24 '17 at 4:47
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I have two SLR cameras that use the Eye-FI cards. Both use my network wifi and dump the images into the same folder on my computer. I have the keenai software running on my computer. I disabled all the cloud uploading. I did struggle a little bit and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, but when I rebooted my computer everything worked awesome. I've been using it for a few months now pretty much on a daily bases. There were a few times where the image wasn't transferring so I launched Keenai from my task bar and fired another shot with the camera and everything synced back up.

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  • +1 I think this is a good answer - it enables you to use any camera that supports eyefi instead of limiting yourself to those that have wifi in camera, and you can switch cameras easily – Gnudiff Jan 20 '18 at 16:24
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Just set up a wireless bridge and all your cameras and access points can be seen on the same network.

google "wireless bridge" for the details.

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