The combination of a little Jazz, abundant cheese platters, and a DJ doesn’t sound like a natural mash-up and isn’t enough to pry us from our new TV appointment of (shameless plug) Wired Science on PBS. But when Nikon promised some insta-testing of its new cameras along said entertainment, we got off the couch, put on the Wired News costume and forced ourselves to have a good time. Nikon is sponsoring a multi-city tour event to show off its latest line of cameras (most of which have been released in the last 40+ days), and gave us one, the Coolpix S51c, to use throughout the party.
What follows is a micro-test of the camera. Notes: 1.This quick hand-on is not definitive, since it involves only one specific picture event: party in a dark room, with crazy lights and fast-moving people. We’ll have a full review in the next couple of weeks. 2. All shots were taken by the s51c, except a couple of pics of the camera itself.
This shot of the Nikon camera lineup shows the nice quality and color brightness of the pictures when there's good lighting. The image sensor of the S51s is at 1/2.5-in. CCD (8-megapixel).
We took these from the top of the balcony, and then the floor. Finely detailed colors with pitch blacks and random colored lights are concentrated (for a dark shot) and don’t bleed into each other here.
The internal zoom, which goes up to 4x (35mm [135] format picture angle: 456mm) is not the best feature at night and showed distinct noise (expected) and details become hardly legible the more you reach the limit. The s51c also includes an o.k. 3x Zoom-Nikkor lens (6.3-18.9mm).
The S51s features vibration reduction (optical VR image stabilization) to minimize lens shake, but it’s hard to tell here. We'll wait for the full test to pass judgment on this one, though you don't have to.
A Good Picture and I Don’t Know. The Face Priority AF feature locks in and focuses on principal faces, making it easy to avoid the background that crowd into portraits. We call the background here ‘perceptive individuals’ but you can call them something else. The colors are well distributed here, too.
The shutter lag is not the best and that’s being kind. We had to lock in our wrist and arm at times, and sometimes, it led to this craziness. We couldn’t hold this one and moved at the last second. The shot-to-shot time appeared to be about average.
The scroll wheel for the UI is iPod-like, responsive, and easy to use, if a bit small for our huge thumbs.
The in-camera red-eye fix is accurate but not really necessary. We’d rather do it in our large screen back home with some top-notch software.
The Wi-Fi feature is interesting as you can upload pictures straight from the camera to a simple proprietary server (Nikon’s Picturetown), or you can upload them directly to a blog like this one. You can also send a picture through mail, as you would with your regular picture phone, but with better detail.
We felt compelled to email this scene. Then we thought, why, this thing has Wi-Fi, I could check my email also! Alas, no. It lacks a browser, so it’s not a full Internet device. Bummer. Embedded Firefox next time, hopefully, somehow.
The camera is light at about 5 oz. with a battery (not really different from others), and felt solid and durable, which is important for those of us that drop them. But in terms of toughness, it’s not in the same class as others, like the Olympus Stylus 790SW, which can be frozen and smacked around.
It has a very nice 3” wide-view TFT LCD with anti-reflection coating, which makes the pictures pop out on the viewer. It does smudge easily, if that’s a big problem for you.
We think the ratio of good pictures to bad ones should be about 3 to 1 for the first couple of hours. To an extent, the technology in today's new-but-simple point and shooters should allow most people to take detailed pictures and avoid regular mistakes and in this very limited picture opportunity, it passed the test. It currently retails for about $330 and has been available about a month.
