Samsung's erratic digicam shower

Edvarcl Heng | Sep 07, 2007

Make that a passing one as well. Right after its IFA showing in Berlin, Samsung Singapore held a local showcase for a selected number of its new imaging products.

But since we've already covered the new Samsung camera range, let's find out what's missing instead.

Out of the new luxury lineup, the NV8 is ostentatiously omitted. For the L-series, the L730 was left out and the S85 was completely out of the picture.

Samsung also bandied its goal of becoming the world's number two in digital cameras by end-2008 at the event.

But a more significant item that was mentioned was Samsung's willingness to build a social network to accommodate the near-viral dissemination of content generated by users of its products.

Dedicated portals will be rolled out to match this need. An example is Samsungplay.com which serves the Korean firm's portable player customers. However, at press time, only users in four Asia countries (China, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan) have their own local Samsungplay.com sites.

Yet while Samsung is obviously broaching a pure online solution, it may not be enough. Already, camera manufacturers such as Nikon and Sony are pursuing a hardware answer at the same time. The Nikon S51c can upload pictures directly into an online photo library via the camera's inbuilt Wi-Fi radio and Sony's Cyber-shot G1 offers wireless sharing of images from camera to camera. The G1 can also serve as a wireless access point for computers to download pictures from directly.

So in the immediate future, what will be the main gateway to photo-sharing networks? Will it be via the tedious link of camera-to-computer-to-network? Or can we skip the middleman altogether?

Right now, Samsung seems to be betting on the former. But if it wants to achieve its goal of world number two in cameras, it had better be right.