The Nikon Coolpix S4 is a pocket size digital camera that can easily fit in a shirt pocket or purse. It comes with a large 2.5 inch LCD screen, 6-megapixel effective CCD, a 10x zoom and more for under $400. It is only 1.4 inches thick, 4.4 inches wide and 2.7 inches high and weighs 9.3 ounces. It is a slim & trim pocket camera with a swivel lens for making the perfect shot with a big 10x zoom lens.
The swivel lens is a nice feature because you don’t have to move the camera to get the perfect shot; just twist the lens up or down to find your best target for a perfect photo shot. Nikon has used a swivel lens for many of its digital cameras, but this one has the nicest LCD screen of any of them and seems to be the most compact of them all. The Coolpix S4 is basically a point and shoot camera allowing for some adjustments, but it cannot go manual in aperture or shutter speed.
The View
The Coolpix S4 is small with a big LCD screen, but it has no optical viewfinder. The LCD is 2.5 inches, amorphous silicon TFT with LED backlight and 110,000 pixels. The color is good bright and easy to see under most conditions, but in bright outdoor sunny conditions the LCD gets very hard to see.
Comparing the S4 LCD verses the 2.5 inch LCD on the
Olympus Stylus 800 Digital Camera, you will see that the Olympus camera has almost twice the pixels of 215,000 pixels verses the S4 of 110,000 pixels. This shows me why the Nikon LCD isn’t as good in bright lighting conditions verses the Olympus camera. If there was an optical viewfinder with the S4, then this LCD would do well for the camera. Since there is no optical viewfinder to use under bright conditions, then this LCD is lacking in what it needs to perform under all lighting conditions.
The Photos & Movies
The photos are saved in JPEG and the movies are stored in QuickTime Motion JPEG.
The movies can be recorded in three modes, 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120. There is a built-in microphone for sound and the recording is at 15 frames per second, which is rather slow.
In the photo mode there are only four settings, 2816 x 2112, 2048 x 1536, 1024 x 768 and 648 x 480. I liked the
2048 x 1536 mode for most of the shots; the colors are bright and clear without hardly any noticeable noise when blown up in size.
The Lens
The lens can swivel 270 degrees, it has a 10x optical glass lenses in 12 elements and 9 groups. The lens extends inside the camera and not the outside of the camera. It is equivalent in 35mm photography of 38mm to 380 mm.
The maximum aperture is f3.5, with preset in 5 steps of f3.5, f4.0, f6.8, f8.0 and f13.6. The shooting range is 12 inches to infinity and in Macro Mode it is 2.5 inches to infinity.
ISO settings of auto, 50, 100, 200 and 400.
The Flash
Five flash modes are available, Auto, Flash Cancel, Anytime, Slow Sync and Red-eye reduction. The flash is mounted next to the lens so when you move the lens, the flash will point in the same direction.
Power & Storage
Power is by two AA batteries that are supplied with a charger. I got 117 photos before the batteries went dead and needed to be recharged.
There is built-in internal memory of 13.5MB. There is a slot for a Secure Digital memory Card.
I highly recommend a 512MB SD card or larger and another set of rechargeable batteries.
Ergonomics
For a guy with a big hand like me the camera feels very small. I love the big LCD screen, but that doesn’t leave much room for my fingers to hold it. The swivel lens is very nice because you can twist the lens to what you want to take, instead of making extra body movements.
The big plus for this tiny camera is the convenience of taking it easily anywhere with you because of the slim compact design.
Other Features
There are 16 pre-programmed Scene modes
There are Single, Continuous, Multi-Shot 16 modes with Time-lapse shooting modes
TTL Auto White Balance, 5 presets and custom set
Graphical User Interface, icon-based or text menus
Exif 2.2 and PictBridge compatible with PictBridge direct-print compliant
Adjustable color modes and saturation
Plug-n-Play USB connectivity
One-Touch upload for easy image transfers
In the Box!
Here is what came in the box I was using.
The Coolpix S4 digital camera.
A Wrist strap, USB cable and A/V cable.
Rechargeable batteries and charger.
A CD-ROM with software and drivers.
Instruction manual.
What I Like
The 10x optical zoom lens is a big plus for this camera, giving a 38mm wide angle to 380mm telephoto zoom.
For a pocket camera it is nice and small and very easy to use.
The 2.5 inch LCD size is a nice plus.
The swivel lens design gives better angle shots then cameras that don’t have a swivel lens.
There are a lot of scene mode that come in handy.
The two AA batteries, which can be purchases at any local retailer, Alkaline, NIMH and Lithium.
What I Dislike
No optical viewfinder
The nice size LCD lacks in bright light conditions
No memory card, 13.5MB built-in memory is not much.
Shutter lag seems to increase with more telephoto use.
Flash is weak.
My Thoughts!
I was asked to try out this camera because it is a gift for Christmas, so I did. My first impression was, wow! This camera is all LCD. For indoor use the LCD worked really well with a good view of what you want to take a photo of. Using the camera outside under cloudy conditions wasn’t too bad, but when the sun came out, the LCD left a lot to be desired. I was using my hand to shield around the LCD so that I could focus on what I wanted to take and it was still hard to see. I can see that if you used the S4 on a white sandy beach (or snow covered ground) on a sunny day that the LCD would be useless. The LCD is the biggest flaw that I have seen with the camera; this is why it is import for me to have an optical viewfinder.
The flash also has it’s week points; I found that 5 to 6 feet was the farthest that you should take photos requiring a flash. At 10 feet, the manufactures maximum range, the photos all turned out too dark. Too close produced a lot of red-eye, but at about 5 feet the red-eye was at a minimum to hardly any at all.
Shutter lag was normal at 1 to 2 seconds in most modes, but it seemed like shutter lag increased when you needed a lot more zoom to 3 and 4 seconds.
The quality of the photos overall were pretty good and they printed up real nice. Photos without the use of a flash produced some clear and brilliant colors with very little noise. The flash photos were good in the 5 to 6 feet range, before or past that, and the noise increased with to close shots being too bright and to far away being too dark. The movie player was like most on a digital camera, fair, but nothing to brag about.
I did recommend buying another camera instead of keeping this one, because it seems to have more minuses than pluses for the price of $399. I would like to see an improved version of this camera with a better LCD and flash; for a Nikon, this is a little disappointment for me.
