The best of the bunch is the Sony TX100V, which not only takes 3D pics using only a single lens, it also takes automatic panoramic shots and can shoot full HD 1080p video at 60 fames per second for ultra smooth video.

There’s also a 3.5″ OLED touchscreen on the back, GPS and a compass, and should sell for around $380 when it’s released in March 2011.

The EX-ZR100 shoots normal video at 1080p at a mroe reasonable 30 frames per second, and like the Casio Tryx, it also features the same art-mode feature. It’s expected to retail for $300 when it’s released in March.

With the new Eye-Fi Direct, the Eye-Fi card makes a smartphone think that the EyeFi is a WiFi hotspot and so the smartphone can connect to the card. Once the connection has been made, the camera can upload its photos via the smartphone’s mobile connection.

In case you think this will be a slow process for some of your larger RAW files, don’t worry – the latest 4G networks that are now live across the US wil transfer data at up to 42Mbps! You might want to go for the unlimited data plan first, though!

Using Wi-Fi, the SH100 can connect to your Galaxy S, which will then act as a remote view finder for your camera, showing you on the phone’s display exactly what the camera is seeing. You can then take a shot from a button on the phone rather than by physically pressing the camera’s button, giving you a unique remote camera facility.

The applications of this are huge and it makes you wonder why it’s not been done before!

More details on the Samsung SH1900 Wi-Fi camera

If you’re wondering why you’d need to see your camera’s viewpoint from your phone, just think about these dieas:

• self portraits are a snap – literally – as you can position yourself in front of the camera and actually see what shot the camera will take without relying on a timer and guesswork
• pictures of wildlilfe will become much easier to take as you can leave the camera in the back garden an watch the wildlife from your phone without disturbing it, taking pics whenever something interesting happens
• candid photos of your friends at parties can be much more candid as they’ll never know you’re taking a picture of them
  as for spy shots…well, I’ll leave that to your imagination!

In addition to the remote viewfinder facility, the Samsung SH100 also uses DLNA so you can see your pictures on a DLNA-equipped TV just by selecting them on the camera’s screen and beaming them to the TV (I do this with my HTC Desire HD’s pics, and its a fantastic way to see the pics you’ve taken).

You can even back up your pics over WiFi or send them to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube or Photo Bucket.

Oh, and as for the camera itself, it’s actually quite good as well! It’s a 14.2 megapixel camera with an f4.7 – 23.55mm lens, 5x optical zoom, 3″ LCD screen and is capable of capturing video at 720p!

Samsung have really pushed cameras into a new dimension with the SH100. The combination of WiFi, DLNA and integration with smartphones not only makes the camera more versatile, it should increase the range of unique photos you can take with very inexpensive technology – and that’s never a bad thing!

[Source: Pocket Lint]

Fortunately there’s a solution. The latest generation of digital cameras have all manner of social photo features that let you upload your pics to sites such as Flickr, Picasa and even Facebook with absolute ease.

We’ve rounded up 5 of the latest social snappers to see how they help you share your pics amongst your friends and across the world,

Kodak SLICE – The sleek-and-cool option

Let’s start with one of photography’s biggest guns – Kodak. This sleek number is one of Kodak’s newest devices, the Kodak SLICE, and it’s bursting with technology to bring your pictures to the web on a device barely bigger than a mobile phone.

The SLICE has a massive 14 megapixels with a 5x optical zoom (never trust digital zooms) and has a very cool 3.5″ touchscreen interface on the back making it simple and intuative to operate. It also has face recognition, so you can tell the SLICE the name that belongs to the face, and when you take pictures, it automatically tags them with the right names. This can save you hours on Facebook!

The best thing about the SLICE, though, is its one-touch upload feature to Facebook, Flickr or email (and even videos to YouTube). Simply find the photos you want to share, press the ‘Share’ button, and select where you want to share them to. The next time you plug the SLICE into your PC via USB, all the pics are automatically uploaded to the destinations you’d selected. There’s absolutely nothing for you to do, it’s all taken care of for you.

The Kodak SLICE is one of the smartest cameras today, and could be the one for you if you want the technology without the fuss.

Samsung ST1000 – The kitchen sink option

The Samsung ST1000 is a camera that has a trick up its sleeve for all you travellers out there – GPS. No, you can’t use it to find your way to Rickmansworth, the GPS is there for Geotagging, the simple process of adding location data to each shot.

So what esle does the ST1000 pack in to its little case? How about 12 megapixels through a very smart 5x inner zoom lens (yes, the zoom is still optical but it’s inside the lens housing!). Not enough? How about bluetooth to send the pictures to your smartphone for emailing? Or onboard WiFi to skip the PC completely and email them from the ST1000 itself? Or DLNA networking for viewing the photos and videos on any DLNA device, such as an HDTV?

Phew! On top of all this, the ST1000 is Flickr compatible (of course) and also boasts working with Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Samsungs own photo website. This is definitely one for the travelling social media enthusiast.

Samsung ST5500 – The amazing screen option

The must-have phone this year has arguably been Samsung’s Galaxy S, and its biggest draw has been its luscious AMOLED screen. Anyone who’s seen one will rave about their vibrant colours and unrivalled contrast.

So what kind of device could also benefit from a display with vibrant colours and unrivalled contrast? A device concerned with imaging maybe? Stwp forward the Samsung ST5500, the world’s first camera to have a beautiful 3.7″ AMOLED touch screen integrated right into its frame, giving superb and accurate previews of the photographs you’ve shot, taking much of the guesswork out of how well the colours and shade have come through its 14 megapixel 7x optical zoom lens.

However it’s not just a camera with a pretty screen. It’s got the same Wifi / DLNA / bluetooth connectivity of its little brother, the ST1000, and also like its sibling, it will upload to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and YouTube. You can even use the wifi to email straight from the camera.

The ST5500 also has some clever ideas about control – yes, you can control it by touching that lovely screen, but you can also control it by tilts and shakes, scrolling through your pictures with a shake of the wrist!

If you like the look of the ST1000 but want that little bit more opulence and image control, the Samsung ST5500 is for you.

Kodak Easyshare C142 – The social media on pocket money option

The gear above is great, well specced and impressive, but it’s also expensive. A much less expensive option is the Kodak Easyshare C142. Coming in at nearly a quarter of the price of the SLICE, this is social media photography at its simplest.

A solid little camera, the C142 still packs an impressive 10 megapixels through a 3x optical lens, and it also boasts a 2.5″ LCD screen, so it’s no slouch technically. The C142 is the modern embodiment of the simple point-and-shoot you had for holidays, so while suited to the kids, it’s also at home with people who don’t want to worry about shutter stops, white balance and ISO speeds but just want to take snaps.

Nowadays we don’t get them developed in an hour at Boots, we upload them, so the Kodak makes that easy too – it’s not called Easyshare for nothing. There’s even a button for it, called – wait for it – Share, which you use to mark the images you want to er, share. Come on, it wouldn’t be easier if it uploaded them for you would it?

Hmm, well actually it does do that too, taking your share tagged images and uploading them to your profiles around the web. See, now it can’t be simpler unless it went on holiday for you and took the pictures itself, and where’s the fun in that?

The Kodak Easyshare C142 isn’t for photographers, it’s for you, the person who just wants a good value and simple to use camera to take a decent picture.

Eye-Fi – The I’ve-already-got-a-good-camera option

There will be some amongst you who have your perfect digital camera, such as a Panasonic Lumix, but find it’s not very good at sharing. However, you’re certainly not going to trade it in for one that does, as the camera you’ve got gives much better results (particularly true if it’s a DSLR you’ve got).

So what do you do? Simple: you buy an Eye-Fi. Using some sort of technology voodoo, the clever bods at Eye-Fi have shrunk a wireless dongle, 8GB of memory, geotagging and “endless memory” into a regular Secure Digital card that’ll pop in a SD card compatible camera (which is most of them).

With the Eye-Fi, you go out and take your pictures as usual, treating it like a regular 8GB memory card. Then when you return home, you switch on your PC and your camera and you go and make a cup of tea. While you do that, the Eye-Fi sends your images wirelessly to your PC – it really is as simple as that.

But what if you’re not near a PC? Well you can even set the Eye-Fi up beforehand with your favourite social site (and trust me, it’ll work with nearly all of them – Flickr, Picasa, MobileMe, SmugMug, Photbucket, webshots…you get the picture), and the Eye-Fi can upload them through Wifi. Let’s not forget Endless Memory either – it basically senses when the card is nearly full and automatically uploads your images, clearing space on the card invisibly to you.

Eye-Fi is an excellent solution for those who want to keep the camera they love, plus it’s also the best option if you want the easy life with its simple wireless uploading.

Summary

So that’s 5 devices to get your pictures out onto the web with the absolute minimum of fuss. There’s a wide variety from the great value C142 to the very cool SLICE, with some excellent gear inbetween. You can even get in on the social action even if your beloved camera isn’t quite modern enough.

So now you have no excuses not to go out into the world and bring back some memories to put on the web, without losing hair over it. So much better than leavin gyour pictures buried somewhere on your hard disk, lost amongst the thousands of others and never to be seen again!

The EASYSHARE M590 is outwardly a simple point-and-shooter that, while looking like the Kodak Disc cameras of the past, packs in a herd of modern web technology that those nice people at Kodak have included for your social delictation.

So what tricks does the EASYSHARE (it really feels like I’m shouting this) M590 have in the world’s thinnest digital camera? Well, technically speaking it has a 14 megapixels through the military-sounding Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lens, all displayed on the 2.7″ LCD screen.

All very impressive but the EASYSHARE (blimey…) M590 also packs a fair social punch with uploading to Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and even Orkut (remember that? Well, you will if you’re Brazillian as that’s the only country left who actually still uses Google’s ancient social network) – very comprehensive. It even talks to a Kodak Pulse Digital Photo Frame.

The EASYSHARE M590 IS DUE FOR is due for (sorry!) release in Autumn in a variety of fancy shades for around $200 stateside with Europe to follow.

The Playtouch has full 1080p high definition recording for capturing those “oh my god” moments we all experience on some of life’s more um, lively nights out, and with the Playtouch you don’t need to mess around searching through the night’s footage when you have a hangover to be getting on with.

The Kodak has a blindingly obviously named “Share” button, and while the name isn’t imaginative, its use is – press Share after taking a picture or video and it’ll tag it for upload. So in the haze of next day, plugging the Playtouch into your PC will automatically fire off those pics of your mate doing something he shouldn’t straight to your social networking profiles.

This is what social gadgets are all about. Fire, forget, and share what you created with all your mates, with the absolute minimum of fuss.

While the Playtouch looks great for stitching up friends, it’s also pretty well specified – 1080p recording, 5mp camera for still images, a capacitive 3″ touchscreen LCD display, HDMI out, SD cards up to 32GB – the list goes on, showing Kodak are certainly serious about helping you film your fun!

The Kodak Playtouch release date is set for the autumn in a variety of colours including Smoke Gaze and Cabana (or black and orange to us regular folk), and will retail at $230 (approx £145).

Obviously this is to show off the PlaySport’s waterproof abilities, as it will work happily in depths of 10 feet or less.

Its usual camera features aren’t too shabby, either – 1080p HD video recording, 2″ colour LCD screen and 5 megapixel camera, all for just £130 ($150) make for a great little device that won’t break the bank.

In addition, the PlaySport will also upload videos and pictures to Facebook and YouTube extremely quickly, making it the perfect camcorder to capture and share your treasured, er, underwater moments!

[Source: Pocket Lint]

Quite how they managed to cram the WiFi gubbins into an SD card is beyond me, but what it gives you is automatic uploading of your camera’s pics and videos to any of over 25 photo sharing Web sites, including Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook and Evernote.

Similar in many ways to the existing Eye-Fi, the new ProX2 offers Endless Memory (oh if only!). What this nifty little feature does is to delete the photos it’s uploaded from the card, meaning you never run out of storage space – ever!

Imagine that – you can keep on snapping away all day, safe in the knowledge that your pics are being sent safely to the cloud.

Eye-Fi works by hunting for Wi-Fi signals. When it finds one that you have access to (it can store configuraiont details for 32 different networks), it’ll automatically upload your pics to the photo sharing site of your choice without you having to do a thing. No messy menus or buttons to push, nothing to remember – just automatic background uploading from any camera.

The new Pro X2 features WiFi 802.11 b/g/n for super-fast uploading on any WiFi network. You can also upload your pics directly to your PC or laptop if you wish via a desktop client that also comes with the card.

In addition, the Eye-Fi Pro X2 will let you upload RAW pics if you’re serious about your shots, and will even geo-tag them for you, as well as renaming them according to time and date. So not only do you not need to worry about uplaoding again, you don’t need to worry about finding your pics either!

As if all that wasn’t enough, the Eye-Fi will even notify you when uploading is complete via Facebook, Twitter, text message or email.

This is an incredible piece of technology, and given that I’ve just bought a Nikon D5000 (ah, so that’s why so many camera-related posts!), it’s something that I desperately want right now!

The Eye-Fi Pro X2 will cost $149.99, but you can get cheaper versions from £50.

[Source: SlashGear]