The Nikon Coolpix P1 is a decent camera. Even if does not compromise much its photographic qualities for its distinctive wireless feature,it has a few too many flaws. The P1 produces sharp images with low-noise levels, good metering and accurate but slightly over-saturated colors. Its disadvantages are quite common for cameras in its class. The biggest weakness of the P1 is its poorly visible LCD combined with the lack of an optical viewfinder. This digital camera is slow for spur-of-the-moment shots, due to its very slow startup of over 4s and quite slow shot-to-shoot speeds. At least this Nikon camera has two reasonably good continuous shooting modes, one at 2.3 FPS (5 images max.) and another at 1.8 FPS (11 images max.).

 

Beware of the Nikon P1's price though, since you can get a superior camera without the wireless feature for less money. Both the Canon Powershot A620 and Fuji Finepix E900 are excellent full-featured digital cameras which can be purchased for a similar price as the Nikon Coolpix P1. Photographically these cameras are considerably superior to the P1, thus posing an interesting dilemma for those wanting wireless capability from their digital camera.

 

The wireless feature of the Nikon Coolpix P1 is implemented as a distinct shooting mode, similar to a scene mode. In this mode, this camera is completely point-and-shoot, just like in Auto mode. Wireless transfers can be done only to computers running Nikon Picture Project software, so checking the hardware and operating system requirements published by Nikon is a must. Its too bad that Nikon (and Kodak too) has not used an open standards such as FTP or NFS to transfer files. This would have allowed the wireless camera to communicate with most computers and even some network appliances. Nikon sells an optional adapter for wireless printing to expand the P1's wireless abilities. Again, check for printer requirements with Nikon.

 

Contrarily to the Kodak Easyshare One, the Nikon P1 can use 802.11g protocol which is faster than the 802.11b. While this prevents the P1 from slowing down an existing 802.11g network, it does not help with the speed of wireless image transfers since the P1 transmits at rates far lower than even the 802.11b protocol allows. Finally, the P1 does not support WPA security which means that a security downgrade may be required for using this camera.