Nikon Coolpix S630

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49301288,00.htm

Reviewed 2 March 2009

Reviewed by Rod Lawton

The £270 Nikon Coolpix S630's 12-megapixel sensor pitches the camera just below the 14.5-megapixel S710, but its 7x zoom offers more than twice the range and it's packed with technology, including auto scene selection, ISO 6,400 and 11 frames per second continuous shooting. But how well does it all work?

Positives
Not many other pocket-sized compacts give you a 7x optical zoom. Nikon's Vibration Reduction system helps reduce camera shake when you zoom in on distant subjects, as does the super-high sensitivity.

If action is your thing, as long as you don't mind shooting at a reduced resolution (3 megapixels), you can capture up to 20 frames at a rate that not even a professional digital SLR can match.

Nice colours, good definition and hardly any distortion -- in test conditions and at minimum ISO, the S630 produced a pretty impressive test shot, but real-world photos may be different (click image to enlarge)

Nikon's worked hard at making the S630 very beginner-friendly. The full auto mode takes care of everything, even selecting the best scene mode automatically. If you think you know better, you can switch to the camera's manual scene-selection mode -- there are 16 options to choose from. A third mode offers the camera's continuous-shooting, high-ISO and face-detection options (including smile and blink detection), while the fourth and final mode lets you shoot movies at a 640x480-pixel resolution.

All of these features are wrapped up in a smart-looking body that comes in a choice of colours. So far so good.

Negatives
There's a big difference between the things a camera can do and how well it does them.

The 7x zoom is disappointing for two reasons. Firstly, it's not a wideangle zoom -- the minimum focal length is a somewhat restrictive 37mm equivalent. Secondly, it's not especially sharp at the edges of the picture or at long range.

We found the S630's controls to be cramped and fiddly

The picture quality overall is only fair. At low ISOs, you get pretty decent definition but, as is always the case with tiny sensors, things fall apart rapidly as the ISO goes up. The S630 can manage ISO 6,400, albeit at reduced resolution, but, even by ISO 400, there's so much smudging and speckling from the internal noise reduction that you may wonder if you should switch to your camera phone instead.

As regards the 11fps continuous shooting, when you check the manual, you find out that you're restricted to between ISO 640 and 3,200. We really don't understand why.

Face-detection appears to be a must-have technology these days, and it's easy to see how smile- and blink-detection capability might seem like great advances. Often, though, you start to have second thoughts when you try using such functions.

The S630's face-detection capability is no better than average. In smile mode, face detection only kicks in when the subject actually smiles. This can make you think that smile mode isn't working. It's all too variable, too unpredictable and too hard to fathom. The S630 also seemed to think that two bits of sticky tape on a nearby filing cabinet was a person.

At ISO 64, the S630's 1/2.33-inch sensor records a surprising amount of fine detail. As soon as the ISOs start to climb, though, this goes out the window (click image to enlarge)

Such flaws are likely to make you unfavourably disposed towards the rest of the camera. It looks pretty, but the buttons are small, the spinning controller on the back is fiddly and the LCD screen isn't that big.

Conclusion
By the time you've worked out everything the Nikon Coolpix S630 does and how to use it, it'll be time to get a new camera. The S630 does everything it sets out to, but not especially well and often with restrictions you may not have anticipated.

Edited by Charles Kloet