Nikon Coolpix S4 review

The scene modes take care of the most common shooting situations. There are five for night photography alone (Night Portrait, Sunset, Dusk/Dawn, Night Landscape and Fireworks Show). Others include Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Party/Indoors, Beach/Snow, Close-Up, Museum, Copy, Back Light, Panorama Assist and Full Auto. Several scene modes include onscreen overlays that help perfect compositions for portraits or landscapes.

The scene modes are the best way to customise your shots because the Nikon Coolpix S4 has no manual focus or exposure controls other than exposure compensation, manual ISO (ISO 50 to 400), white balance and colour options, including Vivid, Black & White, Sepia and Cyanotype (blue). The 256-segment matrix metering system chooses from five f-stops between f/3.5 and f/13.5 and exposures between 2 seconds and 1/1,000 second.

Nikon's signature features include Face Priority focus, which is especially fun to use the first time you try it. In this mode, a square happy face appears on the LCD. When a human face comes into view, a set of brackets chases it around the screen, constantly maintaining focus on the facial features.

You'll also want to explore the Coolpix's in-camera fixes. These include Best Shot Selector, which takes a series of up to ten pictures and saves only the sharpest or best-exposed version, an effective in-camera red-eye-removal tool, and D-lighting, which can brighten inky shadows in a murky or high-contrast shot and save a copy of the resulting image. You can set the Interval (time lapse) feature to take a shot every 30 seconds to 60 minutes.

The Nikon Coolpix S4 has 13.5MB of internal memory, good for just four full-resolution shots. Nikon positions this as an emergency feature, useful when your memory card fills -- like the back-up petrol tank on '50s-era cars without a fuel gauge. Plan on buying a Secure Digital (SD) memory card when you purchase this camera.

Despite the generous amount of power available from the AA batteries this camera uses, the electronic flash is good only to 3m (ISO unspecified). You can choose from flash off, fill flash, auto, auto with red-eye reduction, and slow sync. While you can choose between single and continuous autofocus for your image-stabilised 640x480-pixel movie clips, you'll be shooting movies at a jerky 15fps.

Performance
The Nikon Coolpix S4's performance results were average. It took 2.5 seconds to awake from its slumber and capture an initial shot. Thereafter, it could snap images every 2.8 seconds, slowing to a lethargic 5.6 seconds with the flash. The camera maintains a continuous-shooting speed of 1.1fps, whether at full resolution or at a low resolution of 640x480 pixels. However, at full resolution, the S4 could grab just six shots before its buffer filled, while shooting a virtually unlimited number of frames at low resolution. We snapped 66 photos in 60 seconds before shutter-finger fatigue set in.

Shutter lag was middling at 0.8 seconds under high-contrast lighting, and the red focus-assist light helped this Nikon maintain a similar pace under more challenging low-contrast conditions: we clocked a lag time of 0.9 seconds.