Digital Home Thoughts: The Nikon Coolpix S700: Small with Plenty of Options

Room For Improvement
In terms of things I didn't like, there's not much on the list, but the first one is a big one: when you're previewing your photos, the camera first shows you a chunky, ugly image with a lot of JPEG compression artifacts, then about one second later it does a rendering pass on the image and before your eyes the image goes from ugly to perfect. I've owned a lot of cameras over the years, and I've never seen a camera not be able to render a JPEG properly in the first pass. For those of you familiar with Web graphics, it's like watching a progressive JPEG load (actually, I wonder if the JPEGs the S700 creates are progressive JPEGs?). Regardless, it makes for a poor user experience and it's something I never got used to. My only other quibble is that the auto focus lock seems to take longer than what I'm used to from other P&S cameras, though not by a huge margin. It doesn't seem to matter if it's set on face detection or auto.

Some features are neat, but not particularly well thought out: there's an option for you to select one of your images to appear as the welcome screen when you turn on the camera. That's a nice, personal touch - except that it doesn't re-size the image, instead storing the full-sized JPEG in memory, so when you turn on the camera you see the chunky-looking, pre-rendered JPEG, then the camera goes into shooting mode. Another thing I don't think Nikon thought much about: the battery charger isn't a sleek unit that plugs into a wall socket, it has a long and large standard-sized AC power cable. That takes up a lot more space when travelling.

A Great Buy
My fairly minor complaints aside, when you consider that this camera has an MSRP of $349 CAD/$329 USD, and that you can pick up this camera from Amazon.com for $259 USD [affiliate], for the price this camera delivers a lot of bang for the buck. Depending on where you are in the world, you may find the Canon SD870 for within $40 of the S700 - then the decision becomes more difficult and it comes down to features (and how important the wider-angle lens on the SD870 is vs. the enhanced photo and video features the Nikon S700 offers). Neither camera will deliver poor-quality pictures, that's for certain.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He has a busy month ahead of him with a lot of reviews.