Canon fires cord-free cam

Big in 2006: Canon IXUS Wireless

Due: January

£400

Following hot on the wireless heels of Nikon’s P-series and Kodak’s EasyShare One, we present to you Canon’s first Wi-Fi camera.

The Digital IXUS Wireless – a proper Ronseal name if ever we saw one – looks near identical to Canon’s existing IXUS 50 but with a key difference: it can wirelessly ping photos to nearby Windows computers and PictBridge printers.

 

Canon’s launch announcement coincided neatly with the appearance of the Kodak EasyShare One back in October. In terms of specifications, there’s not much to call between the two rivals – both have fairly bog-standard 3x optical zooms, although the Kodak is only 4MP.

On the functionality front, however, things are a little different. Where the Easyshare One can connect direct to a Wi-Fi hotspot to upload snaps to an online gallery – when you’re travelling the world and want to brag, for example – it appears the IXUS Wireless can only talk direct to a computer or a printer.

What the new IXUS definitely can do is switch into an auto-transfer mode. Photos are then automatically beamed to your PC as you take them – a studio photographer’s dream and a very cool trick for a house party.

Other wireless features include camera control via your PC and wireless printing, though you need to plug in a bundled USB dongle first and it’ll then automatically hunt out PictBridge printers in the vicinity.

Excited? Hell yeah – the picture quality from Canon cameras consistently floats our boat – but we’ll have to wait a while for the IXUS Wireless. It’s slated to appear in January for £400, but we reckon the price will drop when it finally debuts.