By Leonard Goh
20/04/2009
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39005881,44515489p,00.htm

The Nikon Coolpix S630 was announced as part of Nikon's lineup for the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) tradeshow held in Las Vegas earlier this year. The new shooter had its optical zoom range upgraded to 7x over the 4x seen on its predecessor, the Coolpix S620. Other than that, the rest of the upgrades are incremental with most of the functions remaining the same. The snapper's performance was decent and on par with its competitors, but the image quality could have been better.

Design

The S630's design is pretty interesting as its aesthetics lend a better grip to the camera. While most point-and-shoots have a flat body, the Nikon's chassis is slightly curved back on the right. This provides a good hold on the snapper, with the ribbed thumbrest giving additional grip.

Beside the 2.7-inch LCD is a four-way clickable scroll wheel which also controls self-timer, flash, focusing modes and exposure compensation. We've always been fans of scroll wheels as we find them more intuitive for navigating long menu lists. The circular pad is surrounded by four other buttons, which let you toggle between different shooting modes, control playback, access the main menu, and delete images. They are easily accessible with the thumb and make one-handed operation a breeze.

However, we have one minor gripe with the S630's design. The mini-USB and A/V out connector ports are protected by a cover on the side of the shooter. This cover couldn't be opened fully and was an obstruction when we tried to plug the camera to our computer for transferring files.

Features

The S630 is pretty rich in features, but it also lacks some functions which are integral to point-and-shoots these days.

The 7x optical zoom lens is a major upgrade from the shooter's predecessor which has only 4x. The additional reach is great if you want to capture scenes that are far away. However, the lens is widest at only 37mm, which puts the Nikon at a disadvantage against other point-and-shoots with 28mm or wider lenses.

For those who are looking for a point-and-shoot with minimal controls, the S630 may fit the bill. The shooter doesn't have options for manual exposure control, and the closest you can get to tweaking the aperture and shutter speed will be adjusting the exposure compensation. There are also 16 other scene modes to choose from, which optimize the camera's settings to take the best possible shot.

The S630 has a Quick Retouch function which re-adjusts the color and saturation of the shot in playback mode. In some cases, it also brightened shadow areas in our shots to show more details. This is similar to the D-Lighting feature available on this point-and-shoot, as well as most Nikon cameras.

We may not be fans of the HD movie recording function on point-and-shoots because they take up more space on memory cards and require additional processing power from computers if you want to edit them. However, we're pretty sure there are consumers out there hankering after such a feature. They would be disappointed know that the S630 offers video capture up to just 640 x 480-pixels in resolution. Nevertheless, this is still acceptable because it is the minimum resolution at which details are still viewable when shooting video.

The Nikon camera comes with 44MB of internal memory and the expansion slot accepts an SD/SDHC card to store more image and video files.

Performance

The S630 took just slightly under 2 seconds to startup in our Lab tests and the shutter lag measured approximately 0.05 second. These timings are on par with other shooters in its class, such as the Canon Digital Ixus 980 IS.

The normal burst rate of the Nikon camera is about 1.2 frames per second (fps), but that is dramatically improved to 7fps when you switch to the Sports Continuous mode. However, note that the resolution will be reduced to 3 megapixels, and the shooter makes quite a fair bit of mechanical noise when capturing the images.

The optical image stabilizer worked well in our tests, too. We were able to hold the camera and take sharp shots from between 1/20 second and 1/40 second in dim environments.

We didn't have much of an issue with the focusing. It was fast and accurate most of the time, although it faltered on several instances when we tried to take shots in places with low light.

Image Quality

The S630 has an ISO range of 64 to 6,400, but resolution is reduced when you choose ISO 3,200 and above. In any case, we won't recommend using any setting above ISO 800.

At its lowest sensitivity of ISO 64, the shooter produced clean shots with high level of details. There were also no hints of smudging, although we did notice that the test photograph turned out slightly soft-looking. At ISO 100 and 200, we detected small increments of digital artifacts but you probably won't see them unless you zoom in to 100 percent when viewing it on a computer.

Bumping up the sensitivity to ISO 400 is the maximum that we would use. At this setting, the image started to look gritty and details were smudged. At ISO 800, the photograph appeared as though it was a water color painting.

Compared to the Ixus 980 IS and Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX48, the Nikon camera's image quality is somewhat lackluster, but fortunately it does make up for the shortcoming with a longer zoom range.

The colors from the S630 were accurate and saturated enough to our liking. White balancing was correct and we didn't have any weird color hues even when we took shots under mixed lighting conditions. The flash output was also well-balanced and we didn't encounter any instances of our subjects being white-washed by the flash.

Conclusion

Overall, the S630 is a pretty typical point-and-shoot. But considering the current digital imaging market situation, this shooter seem to be lacking some features such as wide-angle lens and HD video-recording features, which consumers are looking out for these days. That said, we're sure some users will find the 7x optical zoom in a compact form useful. However, the image quality could be better, especially when compared with those from its competitors. The price tag of S$599 may also not go down well with some consumers when they can pick up a more feature-rich shooter, such as the Lumix DMC-FX48, for less.