WiFi is a fairly niche feature. Many don't want it and consider it an unnecessary expense. Only the 6D, 70D, and T6i/T6s have it and, of those, many owners of those cameras don't use it.
The CamRanger isn't cheap -- here in the US it's about $300.
From time to time I wanted to be able to pull select images from my camera onto my iPad -- so I could review them in more detail without waiting to return home where I could import them to my computer. I started by getting an EyeFi card.
The EyeFi looks like a normal SD card, but has a WiFi radio in it and firmware that integrates with the camera. After you shoot a photo, the WiFi can transfer the image to another device (it would sync to an Internet cloud-hosted service which, in turn, syncs to your computer... but you can also put it in a devcie-to-device mode where it will transfer to a device such as an iPad even if you're not in range of any WiFi infrastructure.)
The biggest immedaite challenge I noticed was that it cannot transfer while you are using the camera. You have to stop shooting. After your camera has been idle for several seconds, the EyeFi will activate its network (it normally keeps the radio off to save power) and start transmitting. Hopefully your iPad is "on" (which drains power). When the transfer is happening, it's very slow. It takes takes a while for each image to transfer even if they're JPEGs. I normally only shoot RAW. RAW images take a very long time to transmit each image. I would shoot and then want to review the shots but found I was waiting minutes between each shot before anything showed up on the iPad.
A secondary limitation is that the EyeFi only has one function: image transfer. There is no camera remote control capability.
CamRanger provides a much richer interface. They connect via the camera's USB port and they use Canon's APIs to control the camera (from that respect it's no different than using a "tethered" USB connection to a computer and controlling the camera via the computer. This means you get a streaming video of the "live view" through the camera, can control camera focus, control all exposure settings, etc. When you shoot a RAW, the RAW contains an embedded JPEG "thumbnail" image of the shot. The CamRanger immediately transfers these (as you shoot) so you see the "film roll" of all thumbnails you've been shooting. You then tap only those images that you actually want to transfer (so you don't waste time transferring everything -- though you can tell it transfer everything if you want.) Also, the WiFi transfer speed between the CamRanger and iPad (or computer) is fast. Transfers don't take very long. The CamRanger has it's own battery so it doesn't draw down the camera power while in-use.
So yes... it's more expensive, but I think they did a solid implmentation with the product. Given that this whole thing is a niche market anyway, the CamRanger doesn't exactly fly off the store shelves. That means they're investing their engineering resources to a limited market and the cost per-product is naturally going to be more.
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
