Cameras with wireless

Sunday 8 October 2006This is exactly 18 years old. Be careful.

I just recently got a new camera (point and shoot, SLRs still scare me), and it has an SD card in it. My laptop has an SD reader in the side, so I don’t need to use a cable to upload my photos any more. Very cool.

But not as cool as a camera with wireless built into it. The Nikon S7c not only has WiFi built in, but it auto-sniffs access points, and makes connecting extremely easy. Antonio has a complete review and more thoughts here. One of the great things about equipping the camera with WiFi is that they didn’t do the more obvious thing and make it Bluetooth. Bluetooth is designed for short hops, to replace cables. Nikon could have made a small change, getting rid of the need for a cable by adding in Bluetooth. But WiFi is much more powerful, since it means you can be out in public, snap pictures, find an open access point, and start sending pictures. Very nice.

At Tabblo, we think the camera is cool enough that we’re launching the first in a series of theme contests, with a Nikon S7c as the prize.

Comments

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Have you seen the Eye-Fi? It's an SD card with built in 802.11 and Bonjour/Zeroconf.
http://www.eye.fi/
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Very cool. But how does it present a UI for configuration? The camera doesn't know how to do it...
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Sylvain Galineau 1:32 AM on 11 Oct 2006
Nikon is also running a pretty hip ad campaign by giving out cameras to talented Flickr users and using their photos in their ads.
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The FAQ on eye fi's site doesn't say much but I'm guessing that Wi-Fi is used for remote access to the storage media - this would require less capability in the host (work in more cameras) and put the UI on the remote client. We'll have to wait and see.

There are other SD memory + Wi-Fi devices for PDAs (SanDisk, Socket, etc.) however the Wi-Fi capabilities are only available to PDAs that support SDIO, otherwise it only appears as a memory device.

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