By Edvarcl Heng
17/09/2007
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39005881,41100672p,00.htm

It takes little ingenuity to introduce a Wi-Fi camera in 2007.

It's ingenious if someone can figure out a practical use for a wireless camera.

The Coolpix S51c is Nikon's third attempt at playing the wireless camera card--since the S7c in 2006 to the S50c early this year. And in this third edition, the Japanese firm has ramped it up with a megapixel upgrade and an improved online photo storage solution.

But from a design standpoint, it's still ingenuously stale.

Design

But we are not saying that it's ugly. The S51c is a looker with its metallic finish and curvy profile. Its weighty feel (125g) also made us feel it's well worth the S$549 asking price.

Our claims to its mustiness stems from that the S51c (97.5 x 59 x 21mm) looks no different from the S50c (98 x 59 x 21mm) and it's just slightly unlike the S7c (100.5 x 60 x 21mm).

Yet, that's no crying shame. The ThinkPad series of laptops, too, has seen little design overhaul despite the change in owners (from IBM to Lenovo).

Nikon is obviously sticking to what works.

   

No love for the zoom rocker; topview.

And there're plenty that still does. The mechanical scroll wheel on the S51c is fluid and above par compared with others in its class. Case in point? Refer to our review on the Fujifilm Z100fd's.

The LCD remains a meaty 3 inches. Good to compose with, though the colors you see onscreen sometimes turn out different in the captured image.

The user interface is the same familiar one used in most Nikon compacts. Press Mode and spin the wheel to switch between different capture types (Scene, Hi ISO, Shooting, Movie) or enter the camera's setup (which is also home to the wireless and vibration reduction settings). Pushing Menu will bring up contextual options related to the current shooting mode.

There're some shortcuts for quickie composition fixes. Right on the wheel brings up exposure compensation; for the flash mode and down to activate macro mode.

As you probably already guessed, the S51c is a very automatic camera, so there are no manual exposure controls (shutter and aperture). Neither are there custom shortcuts you can set for yourself.

However, because of the way the zoom rocker is positioned (small tiny nub on top right), it can be awkward to use with just one hand.

Another thing we like about the S51c is how functions are at most two to three clicks away, which make for easy operation and a lower learning curve.

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.

Non-Wireless Features

The S51c features the same 3x optical, 38mm-to-114mm-equivalent, F3.3-F4.2 zoom lens as the S50c. It's also a tad tight. And as we said earlier, it's an automatic camera. So the only exposure controls you get are a choice of scene modes (only 15 of them) or tweaking the exposure compensation (plus or minus two EV).

   

The moveable focal point.

The Face Detection mode on the S51c is also slower to detect than some other compacts we tested. But it gives more information than comparable models. The closest face is marked by a double yellow border (metering is based on it), while the rest are tagged with a single border. This is a concern only if you are reliant on a camera's face detection feature.

There's also a Best Shot Selector (BSS) which shoots up to 10 photos in a single burst. It uses the first to determine focus and exposure, while deleting all the pictures save the one the S51c thinks is the best. However, as all the images are deleted, we don't have a base for comparison. We think it's not terribly helpful, and would suggest you don't enable it.

Oddly, you can shift the focus point on the camera manually, with a choice of 99 positions. But you can set only one instead of the dynamic multiple focus points offered by dSLRs. So again, it's not a terribly helpful feature. Instead, a faster option is to focus on a subject and maintain the focus with a half-shutter press while you recompose the picture.

The maximum playback of images is on a 5 x 5 grid. Zooming is enabled during video playback.

Performance

While the S51c is faster over the air compared to its digicam compatriots (for whom Wi-Fi is non-existent), it's slow when it comes to performance. In our tests, the S51c turned in a time of 4.7 seconds to start up and capture a JPEG picture (8 megapixels). This is sub par compared with other 8-megapixel cameras like the Sony Cyber-shot T2 (2.95 seconds), the Fujifilm FinePix Z100fd (3.6 seconds) and the Canon IXUS 950 IS (1.2 seconds).

     

Images are sharp though shadow details to get lost a little.

In shot-to-shot times, the S51c was slightly slower than average with the following results: 2.86 seconds (without flash) and 3.25 seconds (with flash). Unfortunately, among the cameras we tested this year, only the Fujifilm Z100fd (2.42 seconds and 2.68 seconds) and the Samsung S850 (2.1 seconds and 3.2 seconds) came close in lack of speed.

In a turnaround, the S51c is plenty swift for its burst mode (1fps for 8.1-megapixel JPEGs) for its class. In high-contrast conditions, shutter lag was just 0.2 second, which puts it ahead of most of its 8.1-megapixel competition.

Image Quality

Marco photography can be tiresome. Even under adequate lighting conditions and in macro mode, we had to place the camera almost 15cm away from the subject, else the S51c would refuse to focus. But when it worked, pictures were sharply crisp, though we found the dynamic range tended to be clipped at both ends (shadows and highlights).

     

Purple fringing; clear details; noticeable blooming.

In areas of high contrast (such as the cappuccino picture), we found a fair dose of chromatic aberration. But in most cases, it was not noticeable. However, in cases of overexposed pixels, images would bloom, such as the tree image where the sunlight-drenched pixels would spill over to the darker pixels of the leaves.

     

Noise in: Night scene at ISO 1,600; ISO 1,600; ISO 400.

The automatic white balance was accurate when the light source was uniform. But when we tested the S51c in an outdoor café that was lit by a combination of both natural and tungsten light, the picture gained a purple haze. The good thing was that the S51c could employ a manual white balance setting in situations when its automatic white detection was thrown off.

No compact camera is safe from noise and the S51c was no exception. Noise and speckles began to creep in at ISO 400 and steadily got worse as light sensitivity increased. But despite the graininess, night scenes were well-lit and a fair compromise if you didn't want to use the built-in flash, though it's all at the loss of significant shadow details.