Nikon Coolpix S70

With a great-looking 3.5'' touchscreen OLED display and a 720p video mode, the S70 is the first Coolpix to shoot in HD.  It's a great standard bearer for Nikon's stylish S series. 

The specs certainly look great on paper, but that certainly doesn't offer a guarantee of the quality of the photos that this camera produces.  So is Nikon's Coopix S70 worthy of your attention?

Handling

In Auto mode, the interface is composed of a trail of icons around the edge of the screen, which isn't the most attractive or user-friendly way of laying out the controls.  Worse still, the icons are fairly rudimentary and the whole interface is far from elegant.  It's even more a shame as the entire camera is controlled using the touchscreen interface, right down to taking a photo (although this is also a physical shutter release).

Even in auto mode, you can still adjust plenty of settings, including the flash, the exposure correction, the white balance and the macro burst mode.  A motion detector automatically adjusts photos depending on which way up you're holding the camera. 

We'll finish with a criticism: the lens is a little too far up the camera, and we found that there was either a finger or a shadow encroaching on the frame, which can quickly become rather irritating …

Responsiveness

The S70 is about average compared to the responsive of other cameras, with a reasonable start-up time of 1.4 seconds.  In wide-angle mode, the autofocus is pretty fast at 1 s, and an extra light helps you out in low light levels.  In telephoto mode, the camera is a little less speedy, but it's still more than acceptable.  The wait time between two photos is around 2.7 s, which is perfect reasonable.  The S70 isn't exactly the fastest, but it's not a a slow camera either.

Image Quality

Sony and Canon might well have begun to move towards cameras with less pixel-heavy sensors (10 Megapixels instead of 12), Nikon is still using an earlier generation of CCD sensor, and the results are far from outstanding.  Even at the lowest sensitivity, 80 ISO, coloured noise is visible in solid blocks of colour like walls or the sky.  You can see it on an A4 print, although it's not too bad, but it's harder to go and crop photos you've already taken.  Photos are useable up to 400 ISO, but beyond that, the blurriness is too pronounced.  Even up against the Sony T900, which has a similar sensor, the S70 pales in comparison with with a very strong purple tinge caused by too many noisy pixels.



This electronic noise isn't, unfortunately, the only problem, as purple fringing is all too visible in heavily contrasted areas.


In wide-angle mode, geometric distortion is kept in check and there isn't too much evidence of chromatic aberration.  Overall, photos are well exposed, although we noticed a small amount of over exposure in our lab which leads to a lack of contrast.  In general, the photos we took with the S70 were lacking in punch and could do with a little extra something.

The mechanical image stabilisation does it job, and got a sharp portrait shot in 1/4 s, which is more than good given that the maximum aperture in wide-angle is f/3.9.  The macro mode is acceptable but no more.


Video

So … this is the first HDTV Coolpix camera--and about time too!  The effort is worthwhile, of course, but that's not enough.  The S70 can film at a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at 30 fps, but the MJPeg codec it uses is a little behind the times.  There aren't many options either: there's no optical zoom while you filming, no stereo sound absolutely no exposure correction.  We did like the continuous autofocus, which actually works out quite well.  Videos are pretty decent quality and the AVI container format makes editing your videos straightforward.