Nikon Coolpix S51c

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Wireless Features

We would like to say that the Wi-Fi feature is a kingmaker for the S51c, but it's not. Most of the people we showed it to thought it's just a frill, similar to Sony's Cyber-shot G1 which didn't made much headway in terms of mindshare.

Nikon's unique selling point is that you can email your pictures as an attachment, upload them to myPicturetown (2GB of storage), Nikon's new photo storage site, or transfer them to Flickr (once a Flickr account has been tagged to your myPicturetown profile)--all directly from the camera.

Obviously, the enabler here is an Internet connection. It's also its handicap.

Wi-Fi lights; search for SSID; WEP key input.

The S51c's wireless setup is perfectly capable of dealing with routers that are 802.11g-compliant (backward-compatible to 802.11b, but not 802.11a or up to Draft-N). It's also good with encryption security up to WPA2-PSK.

It also works with routers set on MAC address filtering since the S51c comes with its own MAC address (hidden under the firmware tab in the camera menu).

Do note that inputting wireless settings, despite the very good scroll wheel, is still tricky since the wheel is no keyboard substitute. If you can get past that, you will find that Wi-Fi setup is real easy.

But for all its good wireless work, it clicks only with home- and office-owned routers. A public hotspot is out of the question since there isn't a built-in browser to let you access and accept the terms of use commonly required at free access points.

This means you can't take a portrait of a baboon at the zoo and email it immediately across. You will need to head over to a preconfigured private access point to broadcast your monkey business to your friends. This inflexibility is infinitely annoying.

And as with all wireless devices, battery life will suffer the more you use the Wi-Fi feature. Furthermore, the upload speed is also relative to the size of your pictures and, depending on it, waiting for the files to clear can be painfully slow.

myPicturetown screen capture.

However, we see a fair bit of merit as well. If you are overseas and away from a computer, you can clear up memory card space by uploading pictures to myPicturetown via the hotel's Internet connection (if it doesn't need an Internet login).

Registration to myPicturetown is painless as well. After we sent our first picture email, we promptly received a registration email.

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