Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G1

Wi-Fi wizardry?
The hero feature of the G1 is undoubtedly its vaunted Wi-Fi abilities and Sony evidently tries to bring out the G1's wireless best with two features aimed to ride on one of the keywords of the Web 2.0 movement--community building.

The collaboration shot feature on the G1 is essentially Friendster on camera. You link up your G1 with your friends' (up to three), shoot a picture of that hot young thing and the same image will be automatically sent to your buddies' cameras, too. In practice, we found connecting G1s to be slow-going. First, we had to set up nicknames for each of the G1s before initiating the proper startup screen. Then we had to press both WLAN buttons simultaneously (we tried, but even a lag of 1 second is not permitted) and wait for the cameras to shake hands before collaboration shooting was a go.

Sony claims a connectivity range of 10-30m. But do take note that if you want to sync up while one G1 is a fair distance from the other (in our case, it was 10m), you will need to work out a signal to allow both parties to sync the cameras at the same time (we tried shouting). If you are looking to link up three cameras, you need to run through the same procedure twice; once to hook up two, and the second time to sync all three together.

           

Once everything is up and running, the collaboration shot feature is rather fun. A 10m range is a lot to play with, especially when we started shooting from different parts of the office. It is akin to having a periscope to look over the wall at the other side of the fence.

When we took a picture on one G1, we noticed there was a 1-second lag before the image was transmitted to the other G1, although the transfer speed can also depends on the resolution you are shooting at. That's cool by us. But the lag time increased to 4 seconds when both G1s shot a picture at the same time. So if you and the buddy are liable to be shutter-happy, be warned that the cross-update of pictures between two cameras is not exactly real-time.

The second Wi-Fi feature is the Picture Gift. As the name suggests, it allows the user to select pictures from one G1 and transmit them over to another G1. It's easy, but there are quite a bit of permissions involved. After the G1s are linked, you will need to specify which G1 is the receiver and which is the sender. Next, you need to select the images and each highlighted picture will be notated with an arrow pointing upward, after which small thumbnails of the photos you have selected will appear in your pal's G1. He will select the ones to accept from you and the download will start automatically. We felt the transfer speed was not too shabby at 0.34MB per second.

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