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Nikon Coolpix P3 - Camera with wifi
by Lilian ·
I saw the latest feed from dpreview about this Nikon Coolpix P3 with wifi. I tried figuring out why a camera needs wifi. Well, looks like cameras are getting more and more versatile.
I know there is one brand which comes with games. I did tell my hubby that it is one of the most ridiculous idea because when a camera has games, it probably attracts dirty, grubby hands of little children. And children and cameras don’t mix well. Who can tell me which brand of camera is that?
Backt to the wifi camera, I simply must dig through to find out how it works ‘cos this is totally alien to me. I can imagine what a pain it is to transfer large files of 1MB to 2MB (which is the size of a decent photo) from the camera to wherever the pics are supposed to go.
But let’s hear what dpreview has to say about the wifi connection :
Wi-fi connectivity
The P3 is still fairly unusual in offering wireless (Wi-Fi) connectivity (there is a non-Wi-Fi version, the P4, for about $40 less), though as is the case with all such compacts, the dream of ’shoot n send’ wireless functionality is still far from reality.
In order to transfer images to your PC wirelessley you first have to load the software supplied onto the host computer and create a Wi-Fi profile that is transferred to the camera via a USB connection. This is a fairly straightforward process using the supplied setup utility - unless you have a non-standard Wi-Fi network or are using a Macintosh, in which case you’ll have to change some settings manually.
Connection is either via a wireless access point (Infrastructure mode), if you have a home Wi-Fi network, or a direct camera-to-PC connection (Ad-Hoc mode) if you have a Wi-Fi enabled PC but no network, and you can configure the camera to print directly to any printer attached to the host PC. Nikon also sells a printer adaptor (Wireless Printer Adapter PD-10) for about $50 that attaches to the USB port of any pictbridge printer for wireless, computerless printing. What you can’t do is connect to any network that hasn’t been added to the camera using the setup utility (though you can store up to nine device profiles). What we’d love would be the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi network in Starbucks or at the airport and to be able to upload images to a remote server, but that’s a few generations away yet…
(source)
So this answers my curiousity. It is not that cool after all. But it is always nice to know what the future holds.
