Canon PowerShot SD430 Wireless

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05102501canonsd430wifi.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05102501canonsd430wifi.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Canon, a leader in photographic and imaging technology, today releases the Digital IXUS WIRELESS – Canon's first wireless digital compact camera. Bringing IXUS style and performance to the wireless age, the camera's Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b) support offers users a new level of flexibility and convenience in digital photography. The Digital IXUS WIRELESS supports several innovative features, including automatic wireless image transfer and wireless control of camera shooting functions from a PC. It comes supplied with the Wireless Printer Adapter (WA-1E) for out-of-the-box wireless direct printing to any Canon PictBridge compatible printer."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/canonsd430wifi_frontback-001.jpg" /><br /><br />This camera becomes the first Canon model to feature build-in WiFi (802.11b). It looks like it is essentially identical as the SD450 but with the WiFi added (5 mp, 3x zoom). Phil from dpreview.com claims that this camera is more of "a solution looking for a problem". Interesting point actually. When some digital-SLRs first introduced wireless in cameras, I was very excited about then. I can see how you can transfer images directly to a storage device or even a printer. However, there are going to be two concerns - 1) Wireless chips suck battery power like no other; and 2) Will people really find using wireless easier than plugging the camera into a USB dock? These days printer manufacturers are working harder at creating one-touch solutions so I don't know if going wireless is going to solve anything. I do however think that a wireless solution is cool, but I believe it makes more sense in mid to higher end DSLRs where many photos are usually being taken in rapid succession and going wireless could not only increase the storage capacity but also maybe even the write speed (bus 1 writes to the CF card, bus 2 writes via wireless? :) ).

[Jason Kravitz]

I thought about getting the wireless adapter for the 20D but 802.11b and 8mp RAW images seem like a slow proposition. Wonder how fast transferring images is with this camera.

[Philip Colmer]

One area where it might be useful is with the computer-control of the camera. I've been thinking about doing some time-elapsed stuff by getting the computer to take a photo every n seconds, with the photo transferred directly to the computer. You could then create a video from that.

The drawback is that the camera and the computer must be within USB length of each other. With Wi-Fi, that limitation would go away, at least for a reasonable distance.

--Philip

[jeffd]

philip, maybe, but that would def be a battery sucker.

When I think of wifi in photography, I think of a studio where a photographer has the camera on a tripod, and probably hooked to a secondary flash system. afaik while cameras have USB, none support direct transfers over it when the button is pressed. If the wifi supports that, then I can see it being nice on studio SLRs.

That said, why its on a gimpy 3x consumer camera I'll never know. ;) IMO setting up the wifi is much harder then a card reader.

[Jerry Raia]

I'm just a casual picture taker with an SD550 and would have no use for WiFi in this camera.