Nikon Coolpix S52c review

Performance
The S52c takes a good three seconds to power up and take a picture, with the screen coming on but the camera not ready to shoot until the onscreen symbols appear a moment later. Autofocus is reasonably nimble except in low light, and face detection does well to cope with even moving subjects.

Barrel distortion is an issue in the non-protruding lens. It's mainly an issue if photographing patterns, such as a brick wall, but there is a distinct curve to straight lines closer to the camera along the bottom of the frame.

In playback mode, the face-detection button doubles as a D-lighting feature. This pulls detail from darker areas, but at the cost of increased noise in lightened areas and not really doing much with blown highlights.

This image shows the results of the one-touch D-lighting feature on the right. More colour information has been brought out, but at the expense of noisy texture

Burst mode, accessed by a wander through the menu rather than a dedicated button, is pretty decent. It fires ten shots, in an average of 8 to 10 seconds, but we found the number of frames per second varied enormously. At one point the strangely mercurial camera stunned us by firing five shots in one second -- only to take nine seconds over the next five -- but we were unable to duplicate that result.

Conclusion
Since reviewing the S51c, we've become more positive about Wi-Fi coverage, even if that varies massively depending on where you live. Our opinion of these models as cameras hasn't changed much, though: the Nikon Coolpix S52c, like its predecessor, is a fairly average point-and-shoot.

It's certainly stylish, but we're not going to get really excited until Wi-Fi finds its way into a camera that has other things going on, such as the stunning Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500. One to consider if your home is already Wi-Fi'd up, but we wouldn't rely public hotspots.

Edited by Nick Hide