Nikon COOLPIX S4 Digital Camera (6.4MP, 2816x2112, 10x Opt, 13.5MB Internal Memory, SD Slot)

Reviewed by: touristguy87

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: 10x zoom, size, speed, nifty lenscap

Weaknesses: Very little manual control, not very configurable. The bare minimum.

Overall Evaluation: um, this is quite a decent camera, though I have only shot maybe 60 shots from it, from late this afternoon to this evening. The one shot I will post here is just setting it on a post at the Baltimore Inner Harbor and shooting it in normal mode. I want to try the landscape mode and see if the focus is any better. ...this is going to be tough. The camera has all that a shooter "needs". It is like a pencil. You want to draw a line, maybe sharpen it up a little, erase them? Sure, no problem. It'll give you nice, clean black lines, you can erase them with some effort but not much. You want color? Want broad strokes? Get a magic marker. Want a clean slate? Get a new piece of paper.So, why did I buy this camera...after going through an a345, coolpix 4800, a sp-310, sp500 s2, an fz5, a TZ1, and finally, exasperatingly, an a700? Even though this camera lacks so much in terms of features, and has the funky flip lens, and an image sensor that is nothing extraordinary, probably the same 6MP 1/2.5" square-pixel CCD sensor that is in the sp500 and a700?Well, this camera has a little secret. It has a 6.3-63mm F3.5 lens. Combined with a body that is barely bigger than the a700 and a345. Note, that is an F3.5/10x lens, not an F2.8/3.5 10x lens, or F2.8/4.1 10x or 6x, or even worse, an F2.8/5.1 3x lens. Note also that it is not a two-step lens, like the one in the coolpix 4800, so it doesn't suddenly jump from F2.8 to F5.6, say, just because it gets a little brighter. It's linear, at least from what I've seen so far.The problem with almost all the telescoping zoom lens cameras is that they chew up the aperture as the zoom increases, so, at the worst time, under increasing zoom, the camera slows down. That is like your girlfriend gaining weight every day from when you meet until you marry her. After a while she gets to the point where you can only deal with her in daylight when she has clothes on. This camera will happily shoot at F3.5 all the way out to 10x. Which means it shoots faster, in lower light, than any of those other cameras...with a body that is much lighter and smaller. It works with you as the sun goes down, instead of fighting you.So. That is what you get by giving up all those features. And the list of features that you give up is as long as your arm. But it is fast enough, and clean enough (I suspect the noise processing is a little heavy on this camera) to shoot at just about any ISO you want to shoot at, and ISO400 is clean except in incandescent light indoors...and the colors are standard Nikon colors, a little flat but true...unlike the TZ1 and to some extent the a700, the camera is clean and takes good pictures under almost all shooting conditions and. Unlike the TZ1 (which just sucks) and the A700 at ISO400, and the FZ5 under high zoom, or the sp500 in low light, or the cp4800 in anything other than moderate daylight, this camera takes quite decent photos almost all the time. The only thing I would say in terms of the photos is that they seem to have heavy noise-reduction. They're not really sharp at all. Just "ok". And guess what! There are no in camera settings to change this :)...but you have a decent photo-editor, right?It won't even show you the speed, it doesn't even have an option for horizontal & vertical framing lines...it's a butt-simple camera, in terms of options. It's like a Porsche with nothing but the minimum equipment that you need to drive it. At least they let you set the ISO, I'm sure they had a battle about that :)What you have here, folks, is basically a top of the line camera in terms of sheer "craftiness" combined with a bottom-end feature set in a point and shoot frame. If you can deal with that, you'll love this camera. Again I will be posting another photo same as this one but taken in landscape scene mode, to see if it is any sharper. I don't really expect that the auto-focus is all that good, at night, even if the light goes green.