Physical Tour

Front

First off, a quick explanation regarding the yellow-tinged photo you see here. This camera was shot pre-release at the Nikon booth at Photokina, where the brilliant yellow illumination was unavoidable. In fact, the sides of the camera are standard silvery chrome, and the front a deep crimson.

The front of the camera is, to put it bluntly, gorgeous. The subtle sweep on the left side creates a natural platform to rest your hand and grip. There's a small chrome accent along the left side, which enlarges towards the bottom. The flash is central at the very top of the camera's front, and the lens is just to its right, bordered by chrome. In the upper right corner is the auto focus assist/timer lamp.

 

Very glitterati.

Back

The back only has a single feature, the 3.5-inch wide-angle touch screen. Unfortunately, screen resolution is only 230,000 pixels, which leads to images looking rather low-res, as seen in the sample below. One good mark for this LCD, though, was that the anti-reflective coating handled the extremely bright lights in the convention booth very well, and minimized glare. The screen also resisted solarization at all but the greatest of angles.

 

The entire rear of the camera is taken up by the screen

Sides*
*The four dots you can see on the image below constitute the speaker cover. There is another single dot a bit below it, for the microphone, but it is obscured by Nikon's substantial security apparatus.

Nikon obviously didn't trust us with its shiny toys

The right side is coated in chromed plastic, a foolish design decision for an area where you constantly rest your hand, as it instantly becomes covered in fingerprints. Approximately half way up is the wrist-strap connector. Above that is the mini HDMI port, which is covered by one of the weakest, most flimsy port guards we have ever seen. Poor show, Nikon. Poor show.

*The HDMI cover shown here is

exceedingly poor quality
*

Top

The top view of the camera allows you to see the curved nature of the body slightly better, and how it projects slightly around the lens, and smoothly transitions into a valley for gripping on the right. The power button and shutter are both housed on the right of the top of the S60. The camera's body material smudges easily, though it's not as bad as the chrome areas. You'll need to polish it frequently if you want it to look its best.

A gently sweeping body

Bottom

The S60 is the second point-and-shoot camera we've seen at Photokina that has an exposed USB port underneath the body. This is virtually begging for sand, crumbs and other tiny objects to fall in and cause endless consternation. The tripod mount is located in a very strange position. Usually, they're placed either in the center of the camera's bottom, or along the center axis of the lens. Occasionally, they're at neither place, but in that situation they're usually put in a position that's far enough away from the battery door that it can be freely accessed while still attached to a tripod. The S60's tripod mount is in none of these locations. It's not camera or lens centered, and it will obviously block the battery/memory card cover if a tripod is used. This cover also feels exceedingly cheap, as if it'll break with even the smallest amount of force.

The bottom of the Nikon S60

 

Components

Viewfinder

The Nikon S60 has no viewfinder.
LCD Screen
The LCD on the S60 is certainly an impressive size, but its resolution leaves a lot to be desired. At only 230,000 pixels across its 3-inch diagonal length, pixels become clearly visible. The Sony DSC-T700 offers a touch-screen camera with a 3.5-inch LCD, boasting 921,000-pixel resolution, for only $50 more than the S60. What we will say for this screen, though, is that the reflective coating worked well under the ultrabright lights of the convention hall we were testing it in. The screen glare was minimal the entire time.

The LCD is large but pixelated

Flash
**As we were shooting in a fiercely illuminated hall, we couldn't gauge the coverage of the flash, but it didn't strike us as especially bright. Flashes as small as this tend to be underpowered, but at least it's placed quite far from the lens to minimize red-eye.

**

The flash is central on the body of the camera.

 **Lens**

The S60s lens is tucked away in the upper right corner of the body. It is 5.9mm - 29.5mm (35mm equivalent 33mm  -165mm); f/3.8 - f/4.8; 12 elements in 10 groups. It offers 5x optical zoom, but only two f-stops.

Though not very fast at f/3.8, at least the lens offers 5x zoom.

Connections
The S60 has two sets of connections. First there's the USB connector, which is left completely exposed on the bottom of the camera, flush with the tripod mount. Then there's the HDMI output, shown below, which is on the right side. The HDMI port protector is plastic, as is its connection to the body, and feels excruciatingly fragile. This will not to a good job of keeping the plug protected. You can also see in the image below just how easily the chromed sections become smudged and fingerprinted. This was after less than five minutes of use.

The HDMI port with its sub-par cover
Battery
The S60 uses an EN-EL10 rechargeable Li-ion battery, and is only rated for approximately 140 shots. If this is accurate, heavy shooting will quickly leave your battery levels lower than an emo kid without a prom date.

 

You'll get less than 150 shots with this battery,

so charge early and charge often.**Memory**
With the Coolpix S60, the battery and memory card are placed right next to each other beneath the camera. The Nikon takes SD and SDHC cards, which are small, easy to find, have good capacity and are quite affordable.

 

Design / Layout

Model Design / Appearance

The S60 is an incredible looking device. Available in seven colors (which Nikon dubbed Crimson Red, Espresso Black, Arctic White, Burgundy, Champagne Pink and Platinum Bronze), the design of the front of the camera is gorgeous. It's small, sexy and feels good in the hand. It's such a shame that it's nearly bereft of controls.

Size and Handling

The S60 measures 3.9 × 2.4 × 0.9 inches (97.5 × 60 × 22 mm) and weighs 5.2 oz (145 g) without battery or memory card. It's small enough to easily throw in a pocket or handbag, and since there are no projections (not even the lens), it won't get caught on anything. While small and light, it doesn't feel insubstantial in the hand and is easy to hold. The shiny surface, especially around the chromed areas, is easily smudged.

The sole point of interface between the user and the camera is the touch-screen LCD. This camera's fate relies pretty heavily on a fast and accurate control system. Unfortunately, it doesn't achieve that goal. In our brief time with the S60, the LCD touch-screen response was often sluggish or required multiple presses before it registered. In order for a touch-screen camera to compete with standard cameras, the touch-screen has to be just as fast and just as responsive as the competition. With the S60, it just isn't. While it's a nice gimmick, and just tapping the screen where you want it to focus is pretty nifty, it just seems to slow to respond most of the time.

*

• While it looks sexy, the touch-screen LCD leaves something to be desired.

Menu

The menu system is clear, easy to read, and written in large letters. The touch-screen speeds up menu browsing slightly,  as you don't need to scroll through options, you just tap the one you want, and use page up and page down to  move between sections. However, on the down side, navigating around the menus is problematic, and exacerbated by the imprecise controls. To get from shooting mode to the menu, you have to press Home in the bottom right, then Menu, and then find the setting. Even though it's only one extra step, the delay that it causes coupled with the sluggish touch reception means changing settings feels like it takes forever. And going through this every time you want to adjust the exposure compensation does not strike us as good user interface design.

Ease of Use

The S60 is incredibly easy to use, in that it has almost no manual controls, and the interface is extraordinarily simple. The feature where you can tap on an object to focus on it is very handy, and there's a help button in the menu system in case you don't know what you're doing. This camera definitely seems aimed at users who don't want detailed controls, but just want an easy-to-use camera that looks amazing.

Modes

Auto Mode
The Nikon S60 is constantly in auto mode. There is no way to adjust aperture or shutter speed. However, considering that it is so automatic, it handles shooting pretty well. It seemed to focus quickly and accurately. Of course, the real test of an auto mode is how well it handles adverse conditions, not a well lit hall. We'll have to wait to get our hands on a final unit efore we can comment further.

Movie Mode
The Coolpix S60 can shoot video at 640 x 480 (30 fps) or 320 x 280 (30 or 15 fps). It also has a time lapse feature, which can be set to take a frame at set intervals from 30 seconds to 60 minutes, which are then recorded at 640 x 480 (30 fps).

Drive / Burst Mode
In continuous shooting, the camera can take up to 7 photos at 1.2 frames per second. There's also a Best Shot Selector mode, which takes 10 images in a row (at an unspecified speed) and chooses the sharpest one to keep. It seems this would be good for shooting in low light situations, assuming the algorithm is effective enough to tell which image is the sharpest. Multi-shot 16 takes 16 shots at 1.5 frames per second which are then arranged in a grid on a single 5-megapixel image. Finally, there's Interval Timer Shooting, which will take up to 1800 frames at intervals of 30 seconds to 60 minutes.

Playback Mode
During Playback Mode, images can be displayed as thumbnails in a grid of four, nine, 16 or 25 pictures. Alternatively, images can be zoomed in up to 10x, and navigated around by dragging a finger across the screen. The files can be sorted by favorite, shooting mode or date. The editing controls are decidedly mixed. You can trim/crop the image, stretch portions of it and alter perspective. The Color Options setting lets you change the color settings of the image to vivid, black and white, sepia or cyanotype (cyan-blue monotone).There's a paint mode that lets you draw or write over your image using very basic paint tools: pen, stamps and borders. There's a D-lighting tool to help with pictures that have both extremely light and dark areas, and slideshows can be presented on TVs at both standard resolution and HD.

Custom Image Presets
There are 19 different scene modes: Scene auto selector, Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night portrait, Party/indoor, Beach/snow, Sunset, Dusk/dawn, Night landscape, Close-up, Food, Museum, Fireworks show, Copy, Draw, Backlight, Panorama assist and Voice recording. Draw mode just gives you a blank area to play with the drawing tools.

Control Options

Manual Control Options
The manual control options on the S60 are almost non-existent. While you can at least set white balance and exposure compensation, there is no way to directly control shutter speed or aperture. There is no manual focus option either.

Focus
*Auto Focus
*The auto focus seemed to be fast and accurate in our brief period with the camera, with plenty of cool little features. The auto focus can be set to center, face priority or manual. In manual mode, you just tap a point on the screen, and the camera will focus on that spot. Face detection can work with up to 12 faces, and can be set for blink warning and smile shutter. The first warns you when your subject has their eyes shut so you don't take the picture, and the latter can be set to record an image when they smile.

ISO
The S60 has an ISO range of 64 - 3200, a surpisingly expansive range, plus auto (ISO 64-800) and High ISO sensitivity auto (ISO 64-1600). This is an impressive range for a point-and-shoot camera. Unfortunately, at this stage, we can not give any indication of how noisy the images are at the higher ISOs.

White Balance
The Coolpix S60 has white balance presets for daylight, incandescent, fluorescent, cloudy and flash. There's auto mode and Preset Manual, the latter of which is another name for manual white balance. It is pleasant to see a camera that is otherwise so oriented to removing as much control as possible actually offers a custom white balance option.

Metering
The metering mode cannot be controlled. It is center weighted when the digital zoom is less than 2x, and spot when the digital zoom is more than 2x.

Shutter Speed
The S60 has no way of manually controlling the shutter speed. It can run from 1/1500 second to 4 seconds, the latter only in fireworks mode.

Aperture
There is no way to set the aperture on the S60. The camera only offers two steps, f/3.8 and f/6.4 wide.

**Image Stabilization
**The camera uses an optical image stabilization system called Vibration Reduction. While we did not get a chance to test it, according to Nikon it can tell when you are panning the camera horizontally, in which case it will only compensate for vertical movements, and vice versa.

Picture Quality / Size Options
The Nikon Coolpix S60 can shoot at 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 formats, with sizes ranging from 3,648 x 2,736 to 1,024 x 768, and are resizable down to 160 x 120 editing mode.

Picture Effects Mode
The picture effects for the S60 all appear in playback mode. There are color options, which change the image to vivid, black and white, sepia or cyanotype, and paint mode, which lets you scribble all over your picture. You can also morph your images to a certain extent using the stretch and perspective tools. This is a much shorter list than we see on some other point-and-shoots, which is a bad thing if you like your images to come out looking like they've been thrown through twelve Photoshop filters, but just fine otherwise.

Conclusion

**

Conclusion**

Nikon's S60 is a gorgeous slip of a phone, bedecked in a spangled body. It's pleasant to hold and even more so to look at. Functionality wise, the focus is fast, it has a good zoom, and a decent amount of white balance control. The ability to tap any area of the screen to focus directly on it is a nice feature too. However, the camera isn't without its problems. The port cover for the HDMI connector feels incredibly fragile, and the USB port has no protection at all. The touch-screen feels slow and unresponsive, which is a game-killer for a camera where this is the only means of interface. The menus are sluggish to navigate, and have too many levels, and there are almost no manual controls. Plus the beautiful body gets smeared and besmirched by fingerprints far too easily, and the battery life is sub-optimal. The S60 feels like a definite case of style over substance. It's as easy as possible to use, and is a gorgeous piece of gear in any set of hands. But if you want any real control of your shooting experience, then this isn't the camera for you. The Nikon Coolpix S60 is available for $349.99