» Nikon Coolpix S550 10 MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Zoom (Graphite Black)

Nikon Coolpix S550 10 MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Zoom (Graphite Black) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Nikon coolpix s550
Comment: A great camera a very good price my wife loves it.For my money I do not think you can find a better camer.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Does its job pretty well
Comment: This tiny camera does exactly what I want it to do: take decent pictures and take up less space than my Nikon D40, which is just too bulky to carry around all the time.

After taking about 100 photos with the S550 under a variety of lighting conditions, here are my impressions:

The plusses:
- Auto white balance is smart, even under incandescent lights, so you get pretty accurate colors. You don't get the ugly orange hue that many cameras (including the D40) produce when used in this lighting in the AutoWB setting.

- I like that it shows the shutter speed by default after focusing, without showing any other distracting icons or information. You don't get surprised by blurry shots, and the camera does seem to try to avoid excessively slow shutter speeds.

- Pictures do look quite good at reasonable image sizes (6x8, or 8x10).

- Panorama mode is a cool idea, but I haven't tried out the image splicing software yet.

Minuses:

- Noise (graininess) is visible at most ISO values. Despite the 10MP rating you can not make 20 inch prints from this camera that look good up close. Big prints will only look good for photos taken in bright outdoor light --- even using the flash indoors probably won't be enough. Personally, I don't care, I even dial down to 3MP or 5MP to reduce the noise a little. (Note that this is not a Nikon S550 problem, it is a small CCD sensor problem, so it will be the same on any other camera with an equally small sensor)

- This camera seems to inherit its older brother (D40)'s tendency to over-expose. Not a big deal, since the exposure compensation is easy to dial-in.

- No info screen on playback: as far as I can tell you can't view most of the shooting settings on pictures you have taken (it saves them in the EXIF data, so you can view them in your computer, just not in the camera). I was annoyed by this at first, but I guess it doesn't really matter since there aren't any manual controls for you to play with to optimize things.

- eVR is not real VR. I am skeptical about how well this will work, but actually I haven't had any blurry photos with this camera yet to try eVR out on. This is how it should be, though. The short focal lengths of these cameras should make it really hard to have much blur unless you want it, so I wonder whether VR is really necessary on cameras like this.

Overall, I am quite happy with this camera. If this were my only camera, I would probably rather have a bigger CCD sensor to try to cut down on that noise and take better low-light photos. But bigger sensors need bigger lenses, which only fit in bigger cameras: you can't have everything. If you want a good tiny camera, given the constraints imposed by being tiny, this is a great choice.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Nikon Coolpix
Comment: I love it. I've waited a long time to get a great camera like this. It does all the cool new stuff. I'm still learning how to use it and having a ball.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: My COOL NIKON
Comment: This camera is awesome, it is the perfect size for your purse, so you can take it everywhere.It's just what I wanted, something simple without a whole lot of buttons (you rarely ever use).

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Nikon
Comment: This is the easiest camera I have ever used I actually would go as far to say I prefer it to my Canon SLR's this camera takes the clearest indoor pics I have ever taken in my 20 years as an amatuer photographer.

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