Canon's Elph SD430 uses Wi-Fi like a USB cable: Unfortunately, early consumer-priced cameras that include Wi-Fi are either locked to a proprietary service (Kodak) or tied to software that allows image transfers only over a local wireless LAN (Nikon, Canon). I played with Canon's SD430 at CES, and while the $500 camera is small and easy to use, and comes with a USB dongle that works attaches to its $150 dye-sublimation snapshot printer, its use of Wi-Fi isn't superior to a USB cable. In fact, because it requires proprietary, Windows XP-only software from Canon to move images, it's actually less useful than a USB cable, given that so many photo packages and operating systems directly import photos from a host of cameras.

A Canon product specialist at the booth agreed that offering additional transfer choices was basically a matter of firmware; Kodak told me the same thing when I reviewed the EasyShare One a few weeks ago. But could some consumer photographic vendor work with Devicescape to incorporate their compact 802.11 security stack that would have the hooks to offer WPA Enterprise and something like Secure FTP? Secure FTP should be a no brainer hidden in the advanced options.

The first consumer camera that can use Wi-Fi as a medium to transfer images to any of a variety of server destinations will become the camera of choice for a lot of early adopters who want that kind of flexibility.