GenX Digital

You can’t get much sexier than Kate Moss (actually, maybe you can) and Nikon’s taken their advertising plan to new sex-appeal highs to tout their new Coolpix S6 pocket digital. I’ve spent a few weeks with their new flagship Coolpix and my impressions are below.

The first few things I try with any new camera are it’s speed. With kids, a camera that starts up quickly is tremendously important, and the S6 does a pretty good job of it. From a cold start to taking a photo is slightly more than a second, including auto-focus time. After that - it takes between .3 and 1 second to get the rest of the photos. For example - taking a photo of something far away, and then quickly shooting something much closer takes the camera a little time to figure out the focus. But mostly - it was quite quick enough - especially if you are getting photos of people and use the shutter depress mode to focus on the subject and then just wait for the right moment - it’s blazing fast then (as are most cameras).

Besides the fact it has 6 megapixels, the 3x optical zoom is all internal via folder prism arrangement (therefore no lens sticks out of the camera) and it’s small with a huge 3″ LCD on the back - this camera has a couple other goodies of serious note.

The first is the built-in WiFi transmitter. This is a super-nifty feature allowing you to simply turn on the camera when you get home and it will automatically send the photos to your computer wirelessly (if you have a wireless network) or even to print to a wireless printer. Very cool, and it’s much easier to setup with a mac but it’s still easy enough on a PC (you just run the included CD to set up the “profile” on the camera).

The next feature that I like is the “one-touch portrait mode”. It’s activated by a button on the top of the camera and has a very spooky face recognition algorithm that displays a smiley face on top of a face it detects in the photo. This comes in really handy when you’re taking photos of people but they’re not exactly in the center of the picture. Ever notice when you get photos back that the person in the image is out of focus and the camera decided to focus on the grass in the background or something else in the photo? Well, one quick click of this button will let the camera figure out where the face is in the frame and then focus on that no matter where it is. So, if you’re visiting the Lincoln Memorial and have a person in the foreground but off to the side of the photo - the camera will still focus on the person. Very cool. Very easy.

Another feature I’ve been a fan of since I had an HP camera (the R707) and like it - Panorama assist mode. This basically lets you take a panorama by creating a ghost image of the previous image on part of the screen so you can line up the next photograph more easily. I haven’t played with the Nikon implementation after taking the photos, but it was easy enough to take the photo. My only complaint is the ghost image depends on the aperture of the current image. For example - I just sat in my chair in the office and spun around taking photos of the whole office. Since I was inside, most of the photos were taken in relative darkness but when I got to the outside door - the exposure was really bright. Then the ghost image was very bright in the following photo. Probably not a big deal when you take “real” panoramas - outdoors where the images will all be the same relative brightness, but HP’s implementation was better - it just gave outlines of the previous photos in a kind of wireframe.

All in all - it’s a pretty nifty camera. Very nice image quality, quick startup, good resolution, nice functions, easy to use, small form factor but still accessible. I’d give this one 4 thumbs up if I was two people…