Nikon Coolpix S10 Review

Review Date: February 26th 2007
Author: Gavin Stoker

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Conclusion

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	3
Features	3
Ease-of-Use	2
Image Quality	3
Value for Money	3

It looks like a blast from the past, and sure enough the Nikon Coolpix S10 struggles to match the performance of similarly priced compacts today. It's not awful but it's far from great, and, in the final analysis if I'd spent £300 on the Nikon S10, after my initial enthusiasm I'd be feeling pretty deflated. My chief frustration with the Coolpix S10 is the way it struggles to find critical focus time and again – the lens hunting more than it should – and happily takes the shot even if it has failed to find it. This camera is supposed to be easy to use, but you have to work against its limitations rather than with its strengths. Thus it gets a miserly '2 out of 5' stars for ease of use, when its score should be right up there. Of course noise is an issue, but it's less of a problem than I've experienced with Casio and Olympus compacts, and the Nikon S10 can – with a little encouragement – deliver pictures that cause you to muster a 'not bad', which in turn explains the average score I've awarded it. I'm usually the first to applaud any camera manufacturer who dares to come out with something different in the face of identikit parades of compacts – and that design is love it or hate it – so I tried hard to find positives that outweighed the negative. But the Nikon Coolpix S10 ultimately proves that you shouldn't revisit past glories unless you can do it better.

PhotographyBLOG is a member of the DIWA organisation. Our test results for the Nikon Coolpix S10 have been submitted to DIWA for comparison with test results for different samples of the same camera model supplied by other DIWA member sites.

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