Are we getting lazy - lazy enough to spur an entire industry dedicated to eliminating cables for transferring photos from cameras to our desktops? The work involved in plugging in a USB cable to a camera port, and the other end into a PC, is too arduous for humanity, it seems.
South Korean electronics giant Samsung thinks so.
Two days ago it launched not one, but six cameras in Australia that will let users snap photos, then transfer them to PCs and other devices using WiFi - without cables. And more WiFi cameras are on the way.
Samsung, of course, is not the first company to bring out WiFi cameras and many people already use devices such as the Eye-Fi card reader dongle to add WiFi connectivity to existing cameras.
But Samsung believes the WiFi-camera revolution is here and is investing heavily in it. By mid-year, Samsung will have 11 WiFi-enabled cameras on the Australian market.
Its Australia business unit manager of digital imaging, Craig Gillespie, says WiFi-enabled cameras are changing the way consumers experience photography. "We are right on the cusp of something really, really big, I think," he says.
The smartphone camera revolution has already changed the pastime of photography from shooting and hording images in collections to shooting, preserving and then sharing those memories by email and through social networks.
Samsung believes that culture will now permeate into the compact camera market, which has been under siege due to the proliferation of quality smartphone cameras. Consumers, though, still yearn for higher quality images than those offered by phones which also lack optical zoom capability.
"Historically when people have taken photographs they've kept their photos on a memory card. We hear all sorts of stories about people having a full memory card and putting the memory cards into storage. It's like keeping an unprocessed roll of film from 20 years ago," Gillespie says.
"The whole point of taking photos is to see them, share them and experience them again rather than hoard them."
Late last year Samsung released the first of its wave of so-called "smart camera 2.0" WiFi devices. That device, the Galaxy Camera, used Google Android's operating system.
Users wanting to share their photos on Facebook could download the Facebook app from Google's Play store and install it. Photos shot with the device could be uploaded to Facebook and the same applied to other sharings app.
The Galaxy Camera was, however, expensive for a compact camera - $599.
In this new range, Samsung has dropped Android and halved the price. The most expensive of the six WiFi offerings, the WB800F, costs $329. The next, the WB250F, is $279 while the cheapest, the ST 150F, costs $149.
Gillespie believes the six pack of Samsung WiFi cameras will be a hit, given the success of the Galaxy camera last year, which he says achieved more than a 25 per cent market share for compact cameras costing more than $500.
Without the overheads needed by Android, the new cameras are lighter and smaller, yet versatile in their WiFi capabilities. They cater to two scenarios.
Where WiFi is available, a user can link the camera directly to the internet and upload newly taken photos and video to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Microsoft SkyDrive, email them to friends and wirelessly backup photos and video to a PC with "AutoBackup".
Samsung has included special camera apps for these social destinations, with more apps available later through firmware upgrades. That's good news as several mainstream photo destination apps, such as Flickr, Twitter, DropBox and Instagram, are missing now.
Photos that are emailed or sent to social networks such as Facebook and Picasa for sharing are compressed, while those uploaded to SkyDrive, mainly for archiving, are uploaded at full size.
The one weakness we noticed with this was the rudimentary browser Samsung offers when you need to, for instance, log into your SkyDrive account. Entering login details is fiddly. The other scenario is when there's no WiFi. Here Samsung offers MobileLink with a smartphone - the camera becomes its own WiFi hotspot and the phone links to it.
In this mode, the camera can upload photos and videos to an Android or Apple device using Samsung's Smart Camera app available for Apple and Android. This worked well for us and we uploaded more than 40 photos to an iPhone in minutes. Users can then share these photos with social networks via a phone's cellular connection.
Another feature, Remote ViewFinder, lets a user control their camera actions from their smartphone. You can see the camera viewfinder's image on your smartphone display.
The model we played with, the $279 WB250F, has a 14.2 "effective" megapixel back-illuminated sensor, 18x optical zoom, and a 24mm wide-angle lens mode. It has a three-inch touch-sensitive LCD touchscreen.
In the second quarter, Samsung plans to release a further three WiFi cameras - the NX1000, NX300 and NX20 - a trio of WiFi-enabled cameras that can load Samsung detachable lenses.
"The wireless segment has got huge appeal to consumers and connected cameras are going to experience rapid growth in the next few years," Gillespie says. "In this area we are definitely looking to become a dominant player."
Telsyte research director Foad Fadaghi, however, says the jury is still out on the likely impact WiFi-enabled compact cameras will have. "The demand for consumer-level cameras has declined in the past few years mainly due to high-quality lenses on phone cameras," he says.
