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• The Good: Stylish. Compact yet easy to hold. Good-sized LCD screen. Takes decent pictures.
• The Bad: Wireless wouldn't work over WEP encrypted link. No viewfinder.
• The Verdict: Nice camera, wireless still needs work. But they're on the right track.
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REVIEW:

Nikon's $649.95 (Cdn.) eight megapixel Coolpix P1 is a sleek black digital camera with a hidden agenda. It not only takes pictures, it is equipped with wireless technology to allow it to transmit those pictures over WiFi (802.11b/g).

The camera itself sits comfortably in the palm of your hand, and is sculpted on the right side to provide a handgrip. It's small enough that someone with large hands may have difficulty managing its controls.

They're fairly standard controls, however. On top, there's the shutter, the rather tiny on/off switch, and a mode selection wheel, and on the back there's a rocker for the 3.5x optical zoom, three little buttons (Menu, Delete, and one to let you view images) plus a larger cursor control/button to handle navigation on the menus. It also doubles as a selector for macro mode, the timer, or flash options.

Combine all that with a 2.5 inch LCD screen, and the back of the camera is a busy place!

You store your photos either in the 32 MB internal memory or on an SD card (not included). Eight megapixel images take up a lot of room, so when you're shopping for an SD card, get a big one. At the highest quality setting, Nikon estimates that 7 shots will fit in internal memory, and about 60 on a 256 MB SD card.

The camera comes with a rechargeable battery (and charger, of course) that is rated for about 180 shots if flash is used for half of them. Bear in mind that wireless also gobbles power when active.

Test shots of inanimate objects proved excellent — the colours were true and vibrant with or without flash. Flesh tones, however, were on the pinkish side when the flash was in use. The camera did manage to capture the nuances of a black cat's coat, which made the difference between having a photo of a black blob and something recognizably feline. Shutter lag of over two seconds did give subjects a chance to move, though.

Printing the photos to a PictBridge printer worked flawlessly.

A 170 page manual is packed full of information about the many settings and tweaks you can try to improve images. It also explains how you can record short movies at up to 30 frames per second, create panoramas, and apply redeye correction in the camera. Best Shot Selection takes ten shots in rapid succession, and saves only the best one, for situations where the camera may jiggle a bit (in macro mode, for example, or in low light situations where you can't use the flash). There's so much to learn that it takes awhile to fathom how everything works.

But most people who covet this toy want it for its wireless capabilities, and here results were mixed. To configure wireless in the first place, you have to install Nikon's PictureProject software on a PC or Macintosh, then plug the camera in via USB and run through a wizard. In theory, it appears fairly easy — if the computer is configured to talk to a wireless network, the camera can import most of the settings, and did so nicely on our test system. You can choose between peer-to-peer (directly between camera and computer) or infrastructure (via a wireless access point) communications. The instructions in the manual didn't quite match reality, but they were pretty close.

The glitch occurred when we tried to connect to a secured wireless network. Despite multiple attempts at configuration, and entering and re-entering the WEP key to ensure it was correct, the camera could not connect to the network. We even tried swapping out the access point for a different brand.

Nikon tech support suggested a number of other things to try, such as turning off the firewall, that didn't do the trick either (and are not good things to do in any case), and we finally admitted defeat.

Bottom line? It really is a nice camera, but if you're buying it for the wireless, you may be disappointed until Nikon works out a fix.