Why do you shoot photos with your cell/smart phone? Because it's handy – you don't always carry a digital camera with you.
But you also love taking photos with your cell/smart phone – and many smart phones take pretty good photos – because you're able to snap a picture and immediately share it with the world by attaching it to an email or text or uploading it to Facebook or some other social networking site.
Over the last decade, several digital camera makers have tinkered with adding Wi-Fi connectivity to mimic this smart phone photo upload capability, the latest being the Samsung SH100 ($200).
And thus, after our brief App of the Week interlude yesterday, we return to this week's theme, mobile internet access.
Camera WiFi issues
Providing Wi-Fi connectivity in a digital camera to transmit pictures presents a plethora of problems.
First and foremost is actually being able to find and connect to a network. As you've probably discovered when trying to connect a smart phone or tablet to a Wi-Fi network while wandering about, most networks you find are locked or require a fee. For instance, the Samsung allows you to connect to a Boingo Wi-Fi hot spot if available, but you have to have a Boingo account.
One solution for a constant connection away from home is one of the 4G MiFis I discussed on Tuesday. Barring that, you'll have to wait until you get back into the bosom of your home Wi-Fi network to send your photos and videos hither and yon.
How the WiFi works
As you can see in the photo at the left, there's a Home button on the rear bottom right of the SH100. Pressing Home you get a menu of iPhone/Android-like function icons.
Emailing photos is fairly self-exclamatory – tap the "Email" app icon (duh), enter the recipient's address information, then choose a photo to send (you can't pick a photo then try to email it as on a smart phone), then write a note. When you press the "Web" app icon, you can upload photos to Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and to Samsung's own Samsung Imaging site. For instance, click here for a photo of Citi Field I uploaded from Citi Field to Facebook using a MiFi to connect.
You also can upload videos to YouTube, but they have to be shot in the lowest quality – 320 x 240 pixels. You can see the tiny, grainy results in videos I shot of a subway train riding over a street, and some Columbia University track athletes working out. You can shoot 1280 x 720 pixel HD video with the SH100, but this footage can't be shrunk down to be uploaded to YouTube. If you plan to upload your video from the SH100, you have to shoot it in 320 x 240 pixels.
Full-sized photos, however, are compressed by more than half when emailed. Pictures I took at 10 MP – 4320 x 2432 pixels – were received in my email in-box at 1920 x 1080 pixels.
If you want to transfer full-size photos and HD video to your PC, you'll have to connect the camera via its proprietary jack (not any form of USB) or use the SD card adapter and plug the camera's tiny microSD card into your computer.
What about the camera?
The SH100 is surprisingly small – the area of a business card and around three-quarters of an inch thin. It has a resistive touch screen, which means unlike the capacitive touch screen found on every smart phone and tablet extant, you can tap and control the SH100 with gloves on – but it reacts best to fingernail taps rather than finger tip touches.
With its dearth of buttons or physical controls, the SH100 is easy to use once you get used to the touch screen and the menus. Like an iPhone or Android phone, you swipe through four pages of photo, video and communication app icon menu choices like you see in the photo.
Other than Wi-Fi, the SH100 also performs a couple of other tricks, most notably syncing with a Samsung Galaxy S smartphone to act as a remote viewfinder for self-portraits or group shots you want to be in.
You download the Remote Viewfinder app from the Android market. Once downloaded, activate it and tap the similar app on the camera. After some communication hand-shaking – the camera and the phone create their own network, so no need to be in a Wi-Fi hot spot – the phone will display the camera's viewfinder. Pretty cool.
You can set the camera on one side of the room and point it at yourself or a group, and control it via the phone – zoom, resolution, flash, a self-timer and, finally, the shutter release to take the photo. You just have to hold the phone behind you so it's not in the picture, your thumb poised over the on-screen shutter release. You can even review the photo on the phone and decide if you need another take without moving the camera – then upload or email the photo from the phone, bringing us back full circle.
Photo quality
Here's the SH100's Achilles heel – the photos it takes aren't great. They're super-wide, which is nice – you can squeeze a lot into a frame – but you'll see slight fisheye warping in some shots. Images look a hair on the fuzzy size, colors a bit flat and whites tend to bleach out. You can judge for yourself by downloading some full-sized samples I've uploaded here.
But Samsung has a damned good idea here. But just because the SH100 is the only Wi-Fi-equipped camera doesn't mean you can't equip your own digital camera with Wi-Fi. Because you can. Tune in tomorrow to find out how in our final mobile internet installment.
R.I.P.
Since we're taking about digital cameras here, it's appropos to bit a sad but fond farewell to Dr. William S. Boyle, who died last Saturday. Dr. Boyle, together with Dr. George E. Smith, invented the CCD (charged-coupled device), the imaging chip that allowed Kodak to invent the digital camera in the first place.
You can read all about Dr. Boyle and the invention of the CCD in his New York Times obituary.