Hands-on with the Wi-Fi Nikon Coolpix S51c

The Nikon Coolpix S51c has winged its wireless way into work this week. It's a sleek and slim compact camera with 8.1 megapixels and an Expeed image-processing engine. The screen is a gigantic 76mm (3.0-inch) LCD, giving you plenty of scope to preview your images before zapping them off via the wonder of wireless.

The curved aluminium form feels slinky, although the chunky bit is on the wrong side. You control the S51c with a rotary multi-selector -- that's a scroll wheel to you and me. These zippy little scroll wheels are the best thing about some of the Coolpix range, like the S200 and S500.

Optical vibration reduction, face detection and a maximum sensitivity of ISO 1,600 are also in there, but the S51c's big draw is its wireless abilities. Perched helpfully on top is a Picture Mail button, which zaps your photos off by email through the ether to the Cyberweb. Nikon wants you to use the system to upload your pictures to its my Picturetown photo-sharing site, but in theory you can use it to zip those images to any site that features email upload, or even to your own email account.

Setting up your wireless preferences is initially fiddly, but once you've got the hang of it the scroll wheel makes it quick and easy to enter your email address. When we first got our hands on the S51c, the Wi-Fi let us down, even though we were in a swanky restaurant on London's South Bank.

We decided to test it again with Crave's hyperspeed Wi-Fi -- except we couldn't, because it requires a Web browser. We'll give it a third go in some local hotspots and report back in our forthcoming review.

The S51c is available now for around £200.

Update: A full review is now available on the site. -Rich Trenholm

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