The advent of passable-quality cameras in smartphones has cannibalised the budget wireless ip webcams price camera business.
With smartphones typically sporting 5-8 megapixel back-facing cameras, and in the case of Nokia's PureView 808 a whopping 41 megapixels, lower-end camera makers are drastically cutting prices or packing in enticing new features.
WiFi-capable cameras such as Samsung's WB150F, showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, are examples of dedicated cameras trying to grab back sales by offering internet connectivity.
There's no doubt Samsung's WB150F connects to the internet, but Exec-Tech felt let down by the experience of going online with this camera.
Connecting is simple enough. You rotate the camera dial to WiFi, where you find Social Sharing, Email, MobileLink, RemoteViewfinder, Cloud, AutoBackup and TV out options.
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Samsung's WiFi camera falls short
The first thing you notice is there's no menu item for connecting to WiFi. That's hidden as an option in each menu item, which is confusing.
The second thing you see is how tedious it is to enter network settings and passwords.
In contrast with data entry in Samsung's new-age phones and tablets, you enter passwords, login details, email addresses and URLs slowly using the up, down, left and right arrows across a keyboard grid -- as you would when setting up a television with an old remote. It's tedious.
Samsung offers a range of WiFi settings that make it possible to connect to many types of network.
You can even connect the WB150F to public WiFi hotspots such as McDonald's, but the experience is frustrating because of the number of arrow presses you need on the tiny 3in display to scroll down McDonald's home page and accept terms and conditions before you start.
Oh for a touchscreen!
The social sharing submenu lets you post photos and video to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Photobucket, and we tested the first three of these.
Again, you have to tediously enter your login details before you start.
In the WB150F's defence, it does remember login details -- but not all the time and after turning off the camera we were in some cases logging in afresh.
When emailing, the camera - which had been switched off a couple of days - had wiped the few email addresses of senders I had laboriously entered.
The next disappointment was the restriction on photos and video you could upload. I couldn't upload panoramas, and while the camera captures 720p HD video you can only upload 320 by 240 resolution clips.
When I hit the cloud menu, the only option was Microsoft SkyDrive, and that only for photo uploads.
But the camera does have some natty features. The auto-backup service, which unfortunately is restricted to Windows systems, will back up your media to a locally networked PC with Samsung's software installed, and after pairing the camera and PC by cable.
There are proprietary WiFi options if you also have a Samsung phone. MobileLink lets you download photos from your camera to your phone, while Remote Viewfinder lets you trigger the camera from afar using your smartphone.
You can even look through its lens, a clever feature.
The camera has the huge 18x optical Schneider-Kreuznach lens - it sticks out like Pinocchio's nose. Digital zoom is double that: 36x.
Despite this magnification, and the WB150F's 14.2 megapixel resolution, generally good colours and a useful point-and-shoot automatic macro lens mode, the photos are pretty average.
They just don't look sharp. Indoor photos were nothing to write home about, either.
The WB150F, however, offers lots of pre-configured scenes and manual settings, and its menus are easy to follow. It's not hard to use.
It's novel to use a WiFi camera, but after a few days with the WB150F I was craving the simple pleasure of snapping photos to an SD card and mounting it in a card reader - faster than you could type Jack Robinson on its tiny screen.
It's not that I am against WiFi cameras, far from it, but I think Samsung has gone about this the wrong way. Samsung, the world's leading global manufacturer of smartphones, should be well placed to make a WiFi-enabled camera, having made millions of smartphones with internet connectivity, beautiful touchscreens, and decent phonecams.
It needs to adapt this technology to its dedicated cameras, rather than reinvent the wheel and end up with a WiFi user interface that is so 2005.
I'd also like to see the camera capable of connecting to the Google Play store so users can download other photo-sharing apps of their choice to augment the existing limited options.
If Samsung is serious about people carrying around a dedicated camera, it needs to improve the photo quality, especially sharpness, otherwise people will stick with their smartphone cameras.
If any company is capable of producing a good-quality dash camera, it's Samsung but, sadly, the WB150F isn't it.
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